The thriller genre is amazingly malleable. You can start with an escaped monkey, a mystery corpse in frozen tundra, or just two women who can’t bear to be in a room together. You can make your own rules, as long as you do it with style, and take us somewhere surprising. Like using a tricycle to break into the Met Gala.
The Girlfriend (Prime Video, from Wednesday 10 September), is a great example. It takes a relatable premise – what if your mother and your partner don’t get on? – and pushes it to extremity. When privileged surgeon Daniel takes new girlfriend Cherry, played by Olivia Cooke, to meet his family, things are tense from the outset. Daniel’s mother, Laura, is extremely protective, and senses Cherry is hiding something. The women strain to remain outwardly polite while their real relationship grows into one of covert threats, secrets and lies, outmanoeuvring and betrayal. There are chills. But it’s also hot.
The show will appeal, and I say this lovingly, to perverts. Much of its steam comes from teasing the relationship between Daniel (Laurie Davidson) and his possessive mother, played by an imperious Robin Wright. Even Daniel’s father – with whom Laura has an open arrangement – remarks that it’s weird. We first see mother and son together when he surprises her in her private pool, practising her stroke. They wrestle underwater, and later relax in the sauna, her foot resting on his thigh. Cherry sees them kiss on the lips. There are many scenes where Laura and Cherry lock eyes while one or the other is having an intimate moment with Daniel.
The show winks at us, enjoying its mischief. Cherry goes on a Spanish holiday with Daniel’s extended family, including Laura’s best friend and her daughter Brigitte. Cherry is mortified to learn that Daniel lost his virginity to Brigitte. He reassures her “she’s the closest thing I have to a sister”. If incest-tickling isn’t your bag, you may wish to find a more vanilla twisty thriller. Perhaps it’s crass to even name it, but if you’re in the market for a loaf of white bread, it can be a shock to open up a sack of oedipal snakes. I’ll be watching the entire series, purely for work reasons, you understand.
Laurie Davidson and Olivia Cooke in The Girlfriend. Photograph: Prime Video
The Girlfriend is not courting the clammy-handed, though. Its theme is how dangerous any of us might become – or be perceived to be – in protecting what we love. It’s a slippery, clever game of consequences and when violence arrives, it ups the stakes. It uses the Rashomon effect to scale its story. Within each episode, we shift between Laura and Cherry’s perspective – each announced with a bold red title card, like a Sergio Leone film or Lana Del Rey album cover. Going over the same events from opposing points of view makes us question reality. Is Cherry a gold-digging psychopath? Is Laura a smothering narcissist with a vendetta? Both could be true, or neither.
Ambiguities can keep us up all night, baby. Did we catch a knowing smirk on a colleague’s face? A double meaning to an offhand remark? Was the kiss on the lips? The show’s structure raises another question with an existential sting: who is the protagonist and who the antagonist here? We see ourselves as main characters, our actions perfectly understandable. But everyone thinks this: every dipshit playing crap music off a phone on the bus, every romantic prospect who ghosts, every unreasonable ex, antisocial neighbour or Stasi-like boss. They’re all main characters, and we’re in their way. Brrr.
The Girlfriend has a twisting plot, unreliable narrators, hair-raising revelations. It probes status and influence. Cherry is young, beautiful and working class – implicitly a threat to old money gatekeepers. It also suggests how grief within families can cast a long, dark shadow. Any show that pits one woman against another, with a man as the prize, is a risk. But this show is agile. Based on the Michelle Frances novel, it has been adapted by Gabbie Asher and rising star Naomi Sheldon, a performer-writer who co-hosts The Pleasure Podcast. Robin Wright directs half of the series. It is, in every sense, a sophisticated power play.
You may want to skip it on family viewing night, unless you like awkward conversations. But who’s to say they can’t be thrilling too?
