Trick endings come in two categories. In the first, comprising works such as The Usual Suspects, the concluding volte-face lands like a blow, having assiduously disguised itself with subtle misdirection. In the second — the films of M. Night Shyamalan come to mind — the surprise is mitigated by a pervasive sense that all is not as it seems. Behind Her Eyes, Netflix’s new six-part series based on the novel by Sarah Pinborough, belongs firmly in the second camp. Its final moments provide a shock, but only the dullest viewer will fail to recognize that a jolt is coming.
Behind Her Eyes is set in the posh London borough of Islington, where single mother Louise Barnsley (Simona Brown) works as a part-time secretary in a psychotherapy practice. Alone at a bar during a rare night on the town, Louise meets the dashing David Ferguson (Tom Bateman) and enjoys a flirty evening that culminates in an abortive kiss. David, the audience rightly guesses, is not a demure fellow so much as a married one. Making matters worse, he is also an incoming doctor in Louise’s office, as the two characters discover to their dismay the following morning.
Though such a scenario might have been the stuff of screwball comedy a dozen years ago, Netflix’s production is savvy enough to cast it in the realm of moral panic in 2021. Horrified by the political bind in which they have placed themselves, David and Louise rush to assure each other that they can behave professionally despite their inappropriate near-dalliance. Alas, events arise to foil this high-minded plan. Dropping her son off at school one morning, Louise bumps into David’s wife, Adele (Eve Hewson), who decides that the two women ought to become friends. As if that complication weren’t enough, Louise and David prove unable to resist one another. By the end of the second episode, the pair have fallen into Louise’s bed.
If the resulting love triangle is rather standard business, Behind Her Eyes transcends its early conventionality with a trio of strong performances. As David, former Shakespearean actor Bateman does a fine job evincing tortured decency, a quality that may or may not be fabricated for effect. As the neurotic Adele, Hewson moves convincingly between helplessness and something steelier, never quite allowing the viewer to relax into sympathy. Best of all is the work done by series lead Brown, who previously appeared in The Night Manager and The Casual Vacancy. Her Louise is engagingly wide-eyed but possessed of an inborn solidity. She is, in a word, likable, and her performance saves Behind Her Eyes from the seediness that might have attached to a lesser project.
Like any good mystery, Netflix’s series is attended by a number of compelling questions. Why is David so determined to monitor his wife’s movements? Why does Adele, a fabulously rich heiress with a trophy husband, waste so many hours staring into the distance, as if looking for an exit ramp from her life? Most important, what are we to make of the recurring flashbacks in which Adele spends time in a mental institution, kept company by a dissipated Glaswegian junkie named Rob (Robert Aramayo)? The obvious answer is that Adele is troubled and David means to protect her. As viewers will likely intuit, that guess turns out to be very far from the whole story.
To its credit, Behind Her Eyes is content, for much of its run time, to let its various enigmas linger, focusing instead on the relationships between its characters. Of particular interest is the strange and knotty friendship shared by Adele and Louise. Despite the secret that hangs between the two of them, their rapport feels natural, like any solidarity based on mutual circumstances. Both women frequently experience night terrors, the bizarre, lucid dreams from which audiences see Louise awaken on several occasions. As Adele initiates Louise into the meditative remedy invented by fellow-sufferer Rob, the series begins to move toward its breathtaking, preposterous ending.
As previously suggested, viewers are likely to guess that a twist of some kind is coming. The specific nature of the revelation, however, is literally impossible to foresee, proceeding as it does from a plot point that is withheld from audiences until the penultimate episode. Though the scenes that follow are among the silliest ever to appear on television, more curious by far is the ideological distress that Behind Her Eyes has caused in the usual quarters. Across the web, even as #WTFThatEnding was trending on Twitter, critics such as Salon’s Ashlie Stevens were leaping into action to denounce the show’s racism and “dangerous transphobic messaging.” (Since everything is racist and transphobic these days, this is no spoiler.) As a consequence, Behind Her Eyes has undergone a peculiar ennobling. What might have been a flawed but entertaining thriller is now a marker in the culture wars.
Unsurprisingly, what actually happens at the show’s conclusion is much simpler than the oppression sleuths suppose. Driven by plausible motives, a character commits an act of wickedness so startling that only the word “evil” will suffice. The mistake of the Left is to substitute faddish categories for enduring ones. Having largely put aside Judeo-Christian conceptions of morality, liberals now lack the capacity to ground their judgments in language that matters.
A well-acted work of psychosexual intrigue, Behind Her Eyes spins toward an ending that is as outlandish as it is unexpected. If only the conversation surrounding it were less predictable.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
