‘The Girlfriend’ Review: Robin Wright and Olivia Cooke Bring Their A-Game to Amazon’s Amusingly Nasty Thriller

‘The Girlfriend’ Review: Robin Wright and Olivia Cooke Bring Their A-Game to Amazon’s Amusingly Nasty Thriller

The Girlfriend announces itself right off the bat. Over a moody Lorde cover of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” the camera swirls around the exterior windows of a stately London home, capturing disturbing snatches of noise from within. Doors slam. Metal clatters. Voices shout in violent argument: “Laura, put the knife down!” “I need to protect him from you!”

You can guess how the rest of the story plays out from there, even before the premiere jumps back five months to properly introduce its leads — and, for both better and for worse, you will not be wrong. The lack of any real surprises or subversions along the way can be a drag, making the Prime Video miniseries feel a bit padded even at a relatively trim six hour-long episodes.

But it also leaves plenty of room for what is really the series’ greatest draw anyway: the chance to watch Olivia Cooke and especially Robin Wright go toe to toe in wickedly unhinged fashion.

The lead actresses play the two women who love Daniel Sanderson (Laurie Davidson), a sweet-natured med student, more than anyone in the world. Wright (who also directed the first few episodes) is his mother, a well-heeled and well-known gallerist named Laura. She dotes on her son with a protectiveness that borders on possessive, folding him into hugs that seem just an inch too close or a second too long.

When Daniel mentions bringing a new girlfriend home for dinner, Laura’s amused until he clarifies that no, this one’s different — he’s serious about this one. Her grin never falters, but it seems to dim in some barely perceptible way.

Said girlfriend is Cherry (Olivia Cooke), a high-end realtor with working-class roots. It’s not just her name that’s a bit “naff,” as Laura snarks to her best friend, Isabella (scene-stealer Tanya Moodie). From the moment Cherry walks into the Sandersons’ tasteful beige-and-cream mansion, she sticks out like a gaping wound with her dark lips and plunging red minidress. And that’s before Laura catches Cherry sneaking her precious boy off into a side room to give him a blow job — a sight that so unnerves the mama bear, she’s wiping away tears after.

Adapted by Naomi Sheldon and Gabbie Asher from Michelle Frances’ 2018 novel, The Girlfriend splits each of its hours into two parts that play the same events first from one woman’s perspective, then from the other’s. Sometimes, these tellings contradict each other in small ways. More often, they reveal omissions, like a line of dialogue that does not flatter one of the POVs or additional background information unavailable to the other party.

For Laura, that missing context often boils down to her own unconscious class prejudice. Is there truly something off about Cherry, as she insists to her endlessly patient husband, Howard (Waleed Zuaiter), or is Cherry simply unschooled in the ways of their elite class? Does Cherry fibbing about where she went to school or feigning a knowledge of modern art make her disturbingly manipulative, or just desperate to fit in?

Though not exactly a screw-the-rich excoriation on the level of Netflix’s Sirens or Prime Video’s own We Were Liars, The Girlfriend is observant about the ways money divides its characters — the anxiety and ambition it sparks in Cherry, the ease it affords Daniel and his family. But it’s even shrewder about exploiting that wealth differential to play with our sympathies.

So Laura might not be wrong to guess that Cherry pocketed the money Daniel gave her for a first-class ticket and spent it instead on clothes. But gosh, it sure is easy — and fun — to hate a woman who’ll smirk about Cherry’s “terribly expensive” new swimsuit from the top deck of her own family’s yacht.

It is so easy, in fact, that even when Laura does dig up seemingly damning evidence of Cherry’s ill intentions, we might still be inclined to give the poor girl the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she does have a reasonable explanation for crashing her ex’s wedding in spectacularly gory fashion! Who’s to say? Certainly not Laura, who seems determined to interpret even Cherry’s most benign gestures in bad faith.

But The Girlfriend has no intention of valorizing Cherry, either. If the interloper is easier to pity, she’s not much easier to like. She’s unequivocally a liar and a schemer and a social climber with a past so ugly that her own mother, Tracey (Karen Henthorn), seems unnerved by her. The only question is whether she’s all of those things in a dangerous way, or merely an off-putting one.

Having established Laura and Cherry’s mutual animosity right away, The Girlfriend pushes them steadily toward that confrontation teased in the first moments. But just as the push-pull starts to grow repetitive, the show pulls out a dramatic escalation. The plot leaps from a slightly exaggerated take on a familiar scenario to an outlandish power struggle over an oblivious man whose own agency is increasingly beside the point.

As the narrative ramps up, the performances get juicier. Here as in House of the Dragon, Cooke excels at playing her cards close to the chest without ever coming off as a blank slate. You can always tell the gears are turning in Cherry’s head, even if it’s not immediately clear what they’re turning in service of. But it’s Wright who really nails Laura’s toxic combination of wide-eyed faux-naïveté and passive-aggressive neediness. “Just listen to me,” she pleads with her friends and family, unable to fathom the possibility that anyone who’s heard her out might still decline to conform to her wishes.

The Girlfriend does not pretend all of this plotting and backbiting isn’t soapy nonsense. In the canon of based-on-a-beach-read dramas about rich white people acting out, it lands ever so slightly closer to the gleeful trashiness of The Hunting Wives than the high-gloss prestige of Big Little Lies. There are no grand speeches about love or grief, and no artsy shots of the Spanish coastline where the Sandersons retreat in times of crisis. There are, on the other hand, many shots of Cherry draping herself all over Daniel, and one scene of her announcing that she’s “really not a violent person!” while she swings a cleaver at a piece of meat.

This refusal to take itself too seriously helps to insulate some of The Girlfriend‘s craziest turns. You don’t have to pretend there’s anything “realistic” or “relatable” about the ways these people are behaving, or that there’s some greater lesson to be found here. You just have to be in the mood for something a little bit silly, and a little bit nasty.