Did you enjoy The White Lotus, the eat-the-rich satire in which wealthy people behaved awfully against a picture postcard holiday backdrop? Netflix did because it’s remade it, more or less, with its new satirical thriller, The Perfect Couple (Netflix from Thursday).
The big draw for Irish viewers will probably be Eve Hewson, who confirms her status as queen of unhinged Netflix dramas following on from 2021′s Behind Her Eyes (where the big baddie turned out to be … astral projection). In The Perfect Couple, she plays Amelia, the blue-collar fiancée of megabucks heir Benji (Billy Howle), with whom she is set to tie the knot in beautiful Nantucket.
All is wonderful in their world. Or it would be were it not Benji’s quietly disapproving novelist mother Greer (Nicole Kidman, wrestling with a posh English accent and losing) and the groom-to-be’s jock siblings, one of whom is played by Dublin’s Jack Reynor (he keeps getting cast as punchable cads who almost certainly played rugby at school).
A promising cast is filled out with Dakota Fanning as Amelia’s sister-in-law-to-be, Liev Schreiber as Greer’s husband and Meghann Fahy as Amelia’s best friend Merritt – an influencer for whom each new day is an Instagram opportunity in waiting.
Fahy also appeared in season two of The White Lotus and will find The Perfect Couple familiar territory. The apparent aim is to satirise the rich – though it’s not clear precisely what it is about them that the show wants to skewer (that the wealthy are vain and unpleasant?).
As with The White Lotus, there’s also a body – the action begins with the discovery of a corpse floating in the waters outside the wedding venue. With the rogues’ gallery of potential suspects hauled in for questioning, we flash back and forth across the previous few days. The victim’s identity is kept secret until the conclusion of episode one – though it is fair to say that it isn’t so much a bombshell as a damp squib amid the Nantucket dunes.
Hewson is a talented performer who understands the power of understatement. She more than holds her own against big stars such as Kidman and Schreiber. But for all her valiant work, The Perfect Couple – adapted from a 2019 beach read by Elin Hilderbrand – ultimately suffers the same flaws as the vapid millionaires it lampoons. It’s shallow and boring and makes for exhausting company.