Killing Eve premiere review: Nice Face
By Lacy Baugher
BBC America’s latest original series Killing Eve upends many of the tropes we expect from a crime thriller, and is all the better for it.
BBC America’s Killing Eve is one of the best series premieres this year.
The premise of this story — whip-smart detective meets, chases or otherwise challenges a charismatic, talented killer — has been done many times before. British crime drama Luther in particular shares a lot of DNA with Killing Eve, but you can find similarities in everything from Sherlock to The Fall to Mindhunter. (And Criminal Minds and The Mentalist and Narcos and The Following and countless others throughout the years.)
As viewers, we apparently like this sort of thing.
What sets Killing Eve apart, however, is that it’s a story about women. And that makes all the difference.
For some reason, through all the years and all the versions of this type of tale that have graced the small screen, we haven’t really seen it told this way before. Women are almost always afterthoughts in stories like these: They exist to be the hero’s love interest, to serve as the killer’s victim.
Here they are neither, and Killing Eve subsequently feels like a revelation as a result.
The set-up of our story is fairly simple. A Russian politician is murdered by way of a quick slice to his femoral artery in a public place. The only witness, his girlfriend Kasia, needs government protection, and that’s where Eve Polastri comes in.
A bored MI-5 agent who wants more than her career has offered up to this point, Eve (Sandra Oh) is immediately relatable. (I’d share a croissant with her any day.) Sure, she’s a bit odd at times — the scene where she asks her husband how he’d kill her is deeply uncomfortable. It’s all part of her charm, though.
Eve is also rather obsessed with female assassins, and convinced that the murderer in this particular case is female. So convinced, in fact, that she bends some rules to try and find out — ultimately working outside the box to translate Kasia’s Polish slang.
Once Eve hears her witness describe the killer as “a flat-chested psycho,” she’s convinced. They’re not only dealing with a woman, but someone completely new to the killing game. That Eve herself is strangely excited by this confirmation is more than a bit disturbing, of course. But that seems to be the tone this show is generally going for.
Unfortunately, her bosses don’t agree with her, leaving Eve to take her search rogue. (Or at least, clandestine, given that lead MI-5 investigator Carolyn not only confirms her suspicions about the gender of their killer, but taps Eve to help — secretly, natch — track her down.) The hunt, as they say, is officially on.
Villanelle (Jodie Comer), for her part, is more of a mystery in this first episode. We watch her revel in being needlessly cruel to those around her — be they children or the elderly. Yet, she also comes off as strangely lonely (“I just want somebody to play with,” she mournfully intones to her handler at one point) and her magpie-like love of luxury goods marks her as someone trying to fill some sort of hole in her life.
This two women embody very familiar character types. Yet, the fact that they are women is what sets them apart and makes them interesting.
Eve is not only ambitious, she’s smart and unapologetic about it. Plus she’s willing to break the rules when she thinks it’s needed. Male heroes — or detectives in this instance — do this all the time, and no one blinks. But when it’s a female character? That’s still a big deal. Moreover, Eve doesn’t have to become more like a man in order to fulfill this heroic role.
She’s awkward and emotional. She breaks down in full body-shaking sobs when she realizes the witness she was meant to protect is dead. (And that she died while Eve herself was down the hall in the bathroom.) No one judges her for this reaction, either, which makes it all the more amazing. (We all know women aren’t supposed to cry.)
As for Villanelle, she is successful as an assassin in large part because she is a woman. Her victims don’t immediately see her as a threat, and she’s able to use her beauty as a shield in ways that men cannot. (See: The entire hairpin murder in Tuscany, which turns on the fact that her target basically thinks she’s a prostitute.) But she’s not purposefully “girlish” to no end. She doesn’t rely on Alias-style spy wigs to hide her identity. She wears flat boots when she heads off to do the business of murder. She’s a professional, and it shows in the details around her work.
Emotionally, however, she seems closed off, even stunted. Her attempts in the series’ opening to relate to a small child over ice cream are almost grotesque in their wrongness.
At the end of the day, yes, Killing Eve is a flashy spy thriller. It contains a lot of the same elements we know from other stories. But by setting two strong women against one another, the pieces feel entirely different from almost anything on TV right now. And we can’t wait to see where it goes from here.
Killing Eve continues Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on BBC America.