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matic thrillers like “Diabolique,” from
1955, or “Deathtrap,” from 1982, or even
“Wild Things,” from 1998—films that
focus on a tight cluster of heated, pas-
sionate characters locked in a world
whose rules keep changing. “Maybe
his wife is crackers,” Louise’s friend
Sophie says, when Louise expresses
concerns about Adele’s well-being.
“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. And yet the
comment is apt. 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 un-
certainty. Part of the fun for the viewer,
too, lies in just letting go and seeing
where the series’ dizzying hairpin turns
will take you.
I
n flashbacks, we see Adele in a men-
tal institution, whose verdant mead-
ows 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. Her
parents died in a mysterious fire, and
she has gone to the institution to cope
with the trauma. She bonds with an-
other patient, Rob (Robert Aramayo),
a gay working-class junkie from Glas-
gow, who is delightfully irreverent and
suffers from night terrors. Adele, who
is skilled in the art of lucid dreaming,
teaches him how to take control of his
dream life. In the show’s present, she
offers to help Louise, who has night
terrors as well. With Adele’s instruc-
tions, Louise is able to escape from the
images of her recurring nightmares (her
dead mother’s limp hand, a screaming
Adam, the oily, heaving walls of a hall-
way) and into a dreamland that, with
its bright-blue skies, lily pond, and sunny,
gingerbread-esque house, has the ge-
neric pleasantness of a Target commer-
cial or, perhaps, “The Good Place.”
The two-pronged mystery of the
series—What is the secret at the core
of Adele and David’s unhappy mar-
riage, and how might lucid dreaming
be connected to it?—is taut and effec-
tive enough to bundle together a jar-
ring collage of moods and environments.
Flashbacks to Rob, as he narrates his
slummy days shooting up in the Glas-
gow projects, took me straight back to
Danny Boyle’s “Trainspotting,” with its
menacing rhythmic soundtrack thump-
ing beneath a voice-over’s burr; mean-
while, the scenes set in Louise’s mod-
est, knickknack-filled flat, with snatches
of “The Great British Bake Off ” and
“Ab Fab” on the telly, seem to belong,
not just in milieu but also in tone, to
an entirely separate stratum of life, as
does David and Adele’s upper-class do-
mesticity. The spouses circle each other
stiffly at home, like actors in an avant-
garde play. (In one bone-chilling mo-
ment, as Adele chops herbs with ma-
chinelike precision, she cracks her neck
so audibly that I half expected her head
to keep spinning on its axis, “Small
Wonder” style.)
This patchiness might be read as a
comment on class and racial differences,
and their tendency to create discrete
worlds of experience. Adele’s conven-
tional beauty and wealth—her upper-
class English whiteness—is the planet
that the other characters orbit around.
“What is it like to be so fucking rich
and so fucking pretty?” Rob asks her,
adding, “I’ll swap you.” Louise, too, is
awed. “Fuck me,” she murmurs when
visiting Adele and David’s home, taken
aback by its grandeur. But, although the
show might aspire to make sociopolit-
ical points, its agenda is ultimately
murky. It’s never clear, for instance, how
Louise, who works three days a week,
is able to stay afloat in a costly city like
London, or how her Blackness in a pre-
dominantly white environment affects
her. We also don’t learn how Rob the
urchin ended up in the same institu-
tion as Adele the heiress. The show’s
focus is psychic: the human desire to
break free from one’s own limiting nar-
rative, whether in dream life or in real
life, by becoming someone other than
oneself—a craving that is increasingly
explored as the series nears its end.
Now, about that ending. (Here’s
where I arrive at the spoiler alert that
I’ve been working up to since the be-
ginning: Reader, beware!) In the fifth
episode, the show takes a hard turn to-
ward sci-fi, and astral projection enters
the chat. “I’ve always just called it ‘trav-
elling,’” Adele tells Rob in a flashback.
Her lucid-dreaming lessons are a gate-
way to learning how to project oneself
into other people’s waking experi-
ences—hovering, N.S.A. style, unseen
but all-seeing, as they go about their
private lives. Rob suggests to Adele
that they use the technique to pro-
ject their souls into each other’s bod-
ies. (“It’d be such a total mindfuck!” he
muses.) Bad move, Adele: once Rob
enters her body, he likes it there just
fine. He also likes her money, and the
prospect of being married to David.
He kills her and dumps the body—his
own—in a well on the grounds of her
estate. Unbeknownst to David, the gor-
geous shell of his partner now houses
the soul of a murderous junkie, which
might go a long way toward explain-
ing the couple’s marital problems.
That’s only half the twist. When
Rob, as Fake Adele, learns of David
and Louise’s affair, he grows increas-
ingly hopeless at the prospect of re-
capturing David’s love for Real Adele,
and comes up with a new plan. He
tricks Louise, who unknowingly learned
how to astrally project while she was
practicing lucid dreaming, into swap-
ping bodies with him. Once his soul
is in her body, he kills the real Louise,
who is now trapped in Adele’s body.
Rob lives on, now in the form of a
Black woman.
If this seems like a lot, that’s be-
cause it is. It is also difficult to know
what kind of message we are meant to
glean from a white upper-class woman
displacing a Black single mom, not
least since that white woman is in fact
a working-class gay man. But, though
the ending is ridiculous and perhaps a
little cheap in its excess, it works. As I
watched those final moments, the hor-
ror felt not just pleasurable but also
well earned. David, poor boob, has mar-
ried Fake Louise, and we can’t help but
feel sorry for him. Even more unset-
tling is the fate of Adam, who can just
tell that something has gone awry with
his once loving mum—there’s a new
impatience in her voice, a brusqueness
in her gestures. “You’ve always said you
hate boats,” he says miserably from the
back seat of the car, when Fake Lou-
ise suggests that she and David book
a Caribbean cruise for their honey-
moon. “Maybe I’ve changed,” she says,
facing Adam, her eyes startlingly cold.
Is there anything more terrifying than
a bad mother?
