\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>he thriller genre is amazingly malleable. You can start with an escaped monkey, a mystery corpse in frozen tundra, or just two women who can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n The Girlfriend (Prime Video, from Wednesday 10 September), is a great example. It takes a relatable premise \u2013 what if your mother and your partner don\u2019t get on? \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019s also hot.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n 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\u2019s father \u2013 with whom Laura has an open arrangement \u2013 remarks that it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The show winks at us, enjoying its mischief. Cherry goes on a Spanish holiday with Daniel\u2019s extended family, including Laura\u2019s best friend and her daughter Brigitte. Cherry is mortified to learn that Daniel lost his virginity to Brigitte. He reassures her \u201cshe\u2019s the closest thing I have to a sister\u201d. If incest-tickling isn\u2019t your bag, you may wish to find a more vanilla twisty thriller. Perhaps it\u2019s crass to even name it, but if you\u2019re in the market for a loaf of white bread, it can be a shock to open up a sack of oedipal snakes. I\u2019ll be watching the entire series, purely for work reasons, you understand.<\/p>\n <\/span>Laurie Davidson and Olivia Cooke in The Girlfriend.<\/span> Photograph: Prime Video<\/p>\n The Girlfriend is not courting the clammy-handed, though. Its theme is how dangerous any of us might become \u2013 or be perceived to be \u2013 in protecting what we love. It\u2019s 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\u2019s perspective \u2013 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.<\/p>\n Ambiguities can keep us up all night, baby. Did we catch a knowing smirk on a colleague\u2019s face? A double meaning to an offhand remark? Was the kiss on the lips? The show\u2019s 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\u2019re all main characters, and we\u2019re in their way. Brrr.<\/p>\n The Girlfriend has a twisting plot, unreliable narrators, hair-raising revelations. It probes status and influence. Cherry is young, beautiful and working class \u2013 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.<\/p>\n You may want to skip it on family viewing night, unless you like awkward conversations. But who\u2019s to say they can\u2019t be thrilling too?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019t 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19815,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[5459,12164,12163,6694,1779,7544,12165,9241,312],"class_list":{"0":"post-19814","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-girlfriend","9":"tag-oedipal","10":"tag-sexy","11":"tag-shocking","12":"tag-television","13":"tag-thriller","14":"tag-vanilla","15":"tag-viewers","16":"tag-warning"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}