![]() ![]() Does it involve dreams? Or is something supernatural afoot? Does it involve drugs? If you have Eve Hewson in your project, opiates will inevitably be involved. Just as you never know whose nefariousness is going to rise to the surface, Behind Her Eyes is at its best when you don’t know what the inevitable “twist” to the story is going to be. It isn’t always clear what Strand is accomplishing as a director - the sex scenes are more comical than erotic, the dream sequences become repetitive quickly - but he definitely likes framing Hewson and her geometrically precise bob in ways that are unnerving. Hewson makes Adele into a deceptively placid guessing game of a character, finding unnerving moments in tasks both banal, like the symphony of micro-expressions as she sips on a cup of tea, and inherently menacing, like the chopping of herbs with a giant knife. This is Hewson’s second six-part limited series to premiere on American TV in less than a week, following Starz’s adaptation of The Luminaries, and she has settled into a nice niche of strangely, but thoroughly inhabited performances as underwritten women. David is a mass of brooding cliches and you’d be fairly sure he was the malevolent one were it not for how gloriously peculiar Adele is. Louise, played by Brown with the series’ widest emotional range, is plagued by her lack of sleep and by insecurities from being without her young son, who’s spending the summer with his dad. All three points in the love triangle are occupied by people who have reasons to be predisposed toward obsession. The middle episodes work because for a long time, you can’t quite get a read on who that puppet master might be. It’s an introduction with very little energy, so you quickly come to appreciate flashbacks featuring an energetic Robert Aramayo - Young Ned Stark for Game of Thrones fans - as Adele’s institutionalized chum. Of course it almost goes without saying that things which look coincidental probably aren’t and there’s probably a puppet master of sorts here and if these first two hours were the first 15 minutes of a movie, it would be acceptable scene-setting, not gruelingly perfunctory. Almost immediately, Louise is engaged in very different liaisons with both David and Adele, though neither husband nor wife knows that the other is involved with Louise. After Louise (Simona Brown) and David (Tom Bateman) have a romantic meet-cute at a London bar, Louise goes to her job as a receptionist at a psychiatrists’ office and discovers that David is her new boss! Yes, it’s the introductory premise of Grey’s Anatomy as well!ĭavid, it turns out, is married and this becomes important when David’s wife Adele ( Eve Hewson) and Louise have an accidental platonic meet-cute of their own. The last two episodes, all cumbersome justification for what came before, went from dumb to laughably silly.Īdapted for the small screen by Steve Lightfoot and directed by Erik Richter Strand - yes, it’s 2021 and we’re still getting novels by women, about women, with the female gaze explicitly in the title that are translated primarily by men - Behind Her Eyes starts off as a garden variety tale of erotic obsession. Then for two episodes, I began to be respectfully curious about its unspecified mysteriousness. For two episodes I found the series, based on the novel by Sarah Pinborough, to be oddly generic. The new six-part Netflix miniseries Behind Her Eyes, much more modern and yet still awash in gothic trappings, is closer to a worst-case scenario. But it was a show that, for me, worked best in a place of spooky insinuation and became less interesting the more it spelled out exactly what was happening. Thankfully, that's one mystery we can solve, with no spoilers necessary: Here's your guide to the cast of Behind Her Eyes.Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor, itself an adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, never quite descended into ridiculousness. Amid this plethora of mind-boggling mysteries is likely the nagging feeling that you've definitely seen the people on your screen before. ![]() The limited series explores the increasingly tangly love triangle between married couple David and Adele and David's assistant Louise, which builds up across the six 50ish-minute episodes to a finale so jaw-dropping that it launched the hashtag #WTFThatEnding shortly after the book was released in 2017-and which will almost certainly start trending once again as the world starts zooming through the TV adaptation. ![]() The latest example of this expertise in weaving confusingly twisty, supremely disturbing stories is Behind Her Eyes, Netflix's adaptation of the bestselling 2017 novel by Sarah Pinborough. By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.Īt this point, prestige TV has gotten the entire psychological thriller genre down to a science. ![]()
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