68 THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021
ON TELEVISION
WILDEST DREAMS
“Behind Her Eyes,” on Netflix.
BY NAOMI F RY
ILLUSTRATION BY BIANCA BAGNARELLI
I
t can be tricky to pull off a double
twist. “Behind Her Eyes,” Netflix’s
new nail-biter of a miniseries, is the-
matically chaotic, and its characters are
messy, but its ending has an effect like
breaking the seal of a ketchup bottle—
a startling, satisfying pop. Many view-
ers were outraged by the finale; shortly
after the show’s six episodes dropped,
disturbed fans took to Twitter with the
hashtag #WTFThatEnding. But, much
like the “sensation fiction” of the Vic-
torian era—those cleverly plotted “nov-
els 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. It’s the kind of show
that rewards a rewatch, if one is able to
stomach it.
Louise Barnsley (the excellent Si-
mona Brown) is a young Black single
mom who works as a part-time secre-
tary at a posh mental-health clinic in
London. As the series opens, we see
her leaving her seven-year-old son,
Adam (Tyler Howitt), with a babysit-
ter for a rare night out. 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. She insists on buying him a new
one, which ends up being out of her
price range. (“Bloody Macallan?” she
asks, in disbelief. “I’ve never heard of
it!”) One drink leads to another, and
the f lirty evening ends with a kiss,
which David breaks off, looking tor-
tured, before apologizing and leaving.
What a coincidence it is when, the
next day, he turns out to be Louise’s
new boss.
David is a psychiatrist. He is also
married—to the hyper-composed Adele
(a spooky Eve Hewson), a white woman
perennially draped in white clothing.
The couple just relocated from Brigh-
ton to a leafy corner of Islington, where,
as Louise says knowingly, “the local
M.P. lives.” In what appears to be an-
other coincidence, Louise bumps into
Adele on the street and is drawn into
a friendship with her, which she keeps
hidden from David. Soon enough, Lou-
ise and David embark on a steamy affair,
which she keeps hidden from Adele.
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. 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 bot-
tles? 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?
“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 “Han-
nibal,” and the creator of the Marvel
crime series “The Punisher,” on Net-
flix. Unlike the splatter-core violence
of those shows, “Behind Her Eyes” is
more of an inner simmer: its violence
is largely psychological, like if Hanni-
bal Lecter were a repressed housewife.
The show also has supernatural ele-
ments, 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 char-
acters’ innermost desires into high re-
lief. In tone and genre, though, the
In Steven Lightfoot’s twist-heavy miniseries, the violence is largely psychological. show is closest to twist-heavy cine-
