Claire Danes’s “unbroken streak of playing women in emotional extremis” continues, said Mike Hale in The New York Times. In Netflix’s new eight-parter, the “Homeland” star plays Aggie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author grieving the loss of her son, who was killed in a drink-driving accident four years earlier. Consumed by guilt and estranged from her wife Shelley (Natalie Morales), she is living alone in a large house on Long Island, struggling with writer’s block, when Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys) – an infamous property developer suspected of killing his ex-wife – moves into the house opposite her. Aggie is initially appalled but soon senses that “a new book may have fallen into her lap”.
Jarvis is “very wealthy and very unpleasant”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. Aggie is warned that he is dangerous, a psychopath. Yet the two strike up an uneasy rapport and, in a somewhat implausible development, he hires her to write his biography. The drama appears to be heading towards “the big reveal” of whether or not Jarvis murdered his wife, and if Aggie might be next on his list. But somehow the tension fails to develop fully and, ultimately, it makes for a “dour” and “unconvincing” watch.
It may be “silly”, even “ludicrous” at times, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times, but Danes and Rhys are superb, whether “hanging out and putting the world to rights” or pitted against each other in “increasingly unsettling stand-offs”. “Gripping” and often “genuinely scary”, this “gleefully horrible story” is a lot of fun.
Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys star in a ‘gleefully horrible story’
