The Undoing, Limited Series
Psychological Thriller TV-MA, HBO
Based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel You Should Have Known, the first episode of HBO’s The Undoing opens with a trepidatious flashback. And then quickly cuts to two days earlier in the somewhat tranquil home of Nicole Kidman’s Grace Fraser. A home she shares with her son Henry (Noah Jupe) and husband Jonathan (Hugh Grant). We learn a lot in this sequence. Jonathon is a child oncologist and stressed of late. Grace, dressed up for a school fundraiser committee, is first off to her therapy practice to meet clients. Despite their own career success, the tuition for Henry’s private school, Reardon, is paid by Grace’s father, played by Donald Sutherland.
And from there, the episode unfolds to reveal the Fraser’s mostly happy lives. The jarring sequences with Elena Alves, played by Matilda De Angelis, are the only reminders this is a psychological thriller. The scenes with Grace and Elena are the core of the episode. There is a lot said in the unsaid. Elena is the mother of a new scholarship student at Reardon. And director Susanne Bier goes to great lengths to show Elena as an outlier. She’s younger than the other mothers. The camera magnifies how she doesn’t have the Upper East Side polish. It also serves as the gaze of her wealthier contemporaries, as they sexualize her. But how Bier chooses to shoot certain scenes, Elena is hypersexualized. And at this point in the show, it’s unclear if it is relevant to the story.
The show is difficult to discuss without revealing too much. I find it is full of oddities. It’s unclear if this is to serve the psychological thriller narrative. Perhaps it’s a ploy to create suspense where there is none. Whether or not The Undoing is a remarkable thriller remains to be seen. But given that it reunites Kidman with Big Little Lies writer David E. Kelley I’m willing to wait and see where it lands.
