![]() ![]() Her parents died in a mysterious fire, and she has gone to the institution to cope with the trauma. In flashbacks, we see Adele in a mental institution, whose verdant meadows and wandering white-clad patients bring to mind scenes from HBO’s “The Leftovers,” with smidges of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls and Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe” tossed in. Part of the fun for the viewer, too, lies in just letting go and seeing where the series’ dizzying hairpin turns will take you. In “Behind Her Eyes,” it is hard to tell who is warden and who is prisoner, who is crazy and who is sane, and the show revels in this uncertainty. “Proper Jane Eyre-in-the-attic stuff.” Sophie misspeaks: in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, it is not Jane Eyre who is locked in the attic but her rival and shadow double, Bertha Mason. “Maybe his wife is crackers,” Louise’s friend Sophie says, when Louise expresses concerns about Adele’s well-being. ![]() In tone and genre, though, the show is closest to twist-heavy cinematic thrillers like “Diabolique,” from 1955, or “Deathtrap,” from 1982, or even “Wild Things,” from 1998-films that focus on a tight cluster of heated, passionate characters locked in a world whose rules keep changing. The show also has supernatural elements, which reminded me of such series as “Stranger Things” and “The OA,” in which the real is dappled with the mystical in order to throw the characters’ innermost desires into high relief. Unlike the splatter-core violence of those shows, “Behind Her Eyes” is more of an inner simmer: its violence is largely psychological, like if Hannibal Lecter were a repressed housewife. “Behind Her Eyes,” which is based on Sarah Pinborough’s best-selling novel of the same name, has been adapted for TV by Steven Lightfoot-a writer on the NBC thriller “Hannibal,” and the creator of the Marvel crime series “The Punisher,” on Netflix. So why, Louise wonders, does his wife seem so lonely, and terrified that she might miss his calls, which arrive every day at predetermined times? Why is her cupboard crowded with pill bottles? Who gave her the shiner she’s suddenly sporting? Why, for God’s sake, does she only have a flip phone? And why is it that she always seems to know things that she has no logical way of knowing? David has his advantages, among them the physique of a Calvin Klein model, a face that is strikingly reminiscent of Roger Federer’s, and the appealingly brooding air of a hangdog puppy. Soon enough, Louise and David embark on a steamy affair, which she keeps hidden from Adele. lives.” In what appears to be another coincidence, Louise bumps into Adele on the street and is drawn into a friendship with her, which she keeps hidden from David. The couple just relocated from Brighton to a leafy corner of Islington, where, as Louise says knowingly, “the local M.P. He is also married-to the hyper-composed Adele (a spooky Eve Hewson), a white woman perennially draped in white clothing. What a coincidence it is when, the next day, he turns out to be Louise’s new boss.ĭavid is a psychiatrist. “I’ve never heard of it!”) One drink leads to another, and the flirty evening ends with a kiss, which David breaks off, looking tortured, before apologizing and leaving. (“Bloody Macallan?” she asks, in disbelief. She insists on buying him a new one, which ends up being out of her price range. Cue the meet-cute: in the next scene, at a bar, Louise bumps into a handsome, thick-maned Scot named David Ferguson (Tom Bateman), spilling his drink all over him. As the series opens, we see her leaving her seven-year-old son, Adam (Tyler Howitt), with a babysitter for a rare night out. Louise Barnsley (the excellent Simona Brown) is a young Black single mom who works as a part-time secretary at a posh mental-health clinic in London. It’s the kind of show that rewards a rewatch, if one is able to stomach it. But, much like the “sensation fiction” of the Victorian era-those cleverly plotted “novels with a secret” intent on revealing the bonkers impulses beneath the respectable surfaces of ordinary people-“Behind Her Eyes” manages to be both over the top and efficient. Many viewers were outraged by the finale shortly after the show’s six episodes dropped, disturbed fans took to Twitter with the hashtag #WTFThatEnding. “Behind Her Eyes,” Netflix’s new nail-biter of a miniseries, is thematically chaotic, and its characters are messy, but its ending has an effect like breaking the seal of a ketchup bottle-a startling, satisfying pop. It can be tricky to pull off a double twist. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |