Dakota Fanning Double Feature: At The Movies With Kasey
If you are looking for a show that bridges a late summer feeling into spooky season, The Perfect Couple on Netflix may fit the bill. The limited series takes place over a long holiday weekend but has a cold-blooded murder at its core.
In the story, the luxurious nuptials of Amelia (Eve Hewson) and Benji (Billy Howle) are disrupted by the bride finding the body of her maid of honor, Merritt (Meghann Fahy), on the morning of the wedding. As the detectives (Michael Beach and Nikki Henry) investigate the death, the groom’s family home in Nantucket is full of suspects ready to tear into more than the uneaten wedding cake. His mother, famous mystery writer Greer Garrison Winbury (Nicole Kidman), has an icy relationship with everyone, including her playboy husband, Tag Winbury (Liev Schreiber). Benji’s brothers, Thomas (Jack Reynor) and Will (Sam Nivola), are preoccupied with their dramas, and his sister-in-law, Abby (Dakota Fanning), studiously watches all of them. Plus, family friend Shooter Dival (Ishaan Khattar) tried to run away on the ferry. But why?
The Perfect Couple emphasizes that neither Amelia and Benji nor Greer and Tag are the perfect couple they look like from the outside. They are just rich and, despite how often the family likes to remind the Nantucket police of their generous donations, money cannot buy happiness. Especially not with all the cheating going on. The setup looks an awful lot like The White Lotus and Big Little Lies. At some point, all these rich people problems are just not that interesting. Still, the writing does an excellent job of making everyone look suspicious. The audience gets a lot of information upfront, through flashes of police interrogations, but these fragments include several red herrings. At times, however, there are so many different threads of the story that elements, such as the youngest son’s blossoming romance with a cop’s daughter, are superfluous in a way that hints at the difficulties of adapting a novel for television.
Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber are the big names in the cast, but neither gives a performance that stretches their abilities. These characters are on-brand for both of them and, although they have great chemistry together, their performances do not add much to the storytelling. By contrast, Eve Hewson and Billy Howle show a lot of emotional range, but it is hard to believe they were in love. Perhaps that works for the story, though. Dakota Fanning’s performance is a highlight, as it is hard to tell where her heart lies for much of the story. Sometimes she is very sweet and sometimes the expressions on her face seem almost sinister. Watching her as the mystery unfolds adds a lot to the game of trying to figure it out.
Perhaps my favorite part of watching The Perfect Couple was dreaming about how much writing I would get done if I had an office with the quiet ocean view that Greer has. Between the scenic locations, summery fashions, and plot twists, the series is plenty diverting.
The Perfect Couple was created by Jenna Lamia, based on the book by Elin Hilderbrand. It is rated TV-MA and runs for 6 1-hour episodes on Netflix.
Why not make it a Dakota Fanning double feature? Fanning’s horror movie from earlier this year, The Watchers, has arrived on Max. The film focuses on a woman, Mina (Fanning), who is trapped under heavy grief and guilt before she gets lost in an Irish forest. There, she discovers a group of strangers hiding in a bunker: Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), Ciara (Georgina Campbell), and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan). They explain that the forest is full of mysterious, violent creatures, Watchers, who can shapeshift, play tricks, and kill them if they do not make it back to the bunker by nightfall.
The Watchers feels like A Quiet Place meets The Village, which makes sense because it was written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter, Ishana. This younger Shyamalan creates a moody, eerie atmosphere and highlights a quietly distraught performance by Fanning. The plot does have two major twists, and in those moments it does not successfully balance the wonder and terror the screenplay strives for. It is hard to explain without spoiling the movie, but the creature design and the folklore look mismatched at times, making the movie fall flat once the source of the scares is revealed. Some viewers will enjoy the spookiness without The Watchers being too scary and others, like me, will wish the horror had been dialed up.
The Watchers was written and directed by Ishana Shyamalan, based on the novel by A.M. Shine. It runs 102 minutes and is rated PG-13.
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