Messy, Melodramatic Thriller The Girlfriend Plays With Our Ideas of Perception

Prime Video’s The Girlfriend is not what anyone would call a subtle show. A twist on meeting the parents gone bad, it takes a fairly mundane premise—what if your mother and your romantic partner don’t like each other—and turns everything about it up to eleven, ramping up the jealousy, cruelty, and paranoia to almost unbearable heights as two women rip each other (and eventually themselves) to pieces over a man that doesn’t seem particularly worthy of either of them. It’s easy to guess where this show is headed from its opening moments, which feature views of a posh London home as doors slam and two voices are raised in threat and fear, accompanied by a Lorde cover of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” playing in the background. Which of these women will rule this particular world is the question the series aims to answer, and though nothing about it reinvents the wheel in terms of the thriller genre, it’s still a decent enough time. 

A show that doesn’t quite know whether it’s a psychological thriller, a campy melodrama, or a social satire about class issues, The Girlfriend splits the difference by being a bit of everything all at once. A glossy drama whose prestige sheen covers an unapologetically trashy center, it’s indulgent and ridiculous in all the ways that make the popular women behaving badly genre of television enjoyable. Although everyone should probably know going in that you will not be just asked to suspend your disbelief, but basically chuck it straight out the window.

The story follows Laura Sanderson (Robin Wright), a wealthy gallerist whose relationship with her med student son Daniel (Laurie Davidson) is unusually close. She’s possessive, and he’s clingy. When we first meet the pair, they’re wrestling in the pool in a way that is….well, let’s just say it’s not particularly Leave It to Beaver-coded. (No, really, there are multiple arch comments over the course of the show—including from the boy’s own father—about this pair’s closeness and how weird it is.) But things between them get complicated quickly when Daniel decides to bring his new girlfriend, the atrociously named Cherry Laine (Olivia Cooke), home for dinner. 

A high-end real estate agent attempting to escape her working-class roots, Cherry doesn’t exactly fit in to the Sandersons’ posh and polished world. Her red minidress is wildly inappropriate for a family dinner, she and Daniel are almost embarrassingly handsy at the table, and she tells a few innocuous but incredibly easy to disprove lies about her background that do nothing but feed into Laura’s suspicion that the girl now dating her precious son has something to hide. But is she just an overprotective parent overreacting to someone horning in on her relationship with her son? Or is there something more sinister at work here?

The most interesting part of The Girlfriend is its format. Each episode is told in two halves, with one following Laura’s point of view, and the other covering many of the same events from Cherry’s perspective. The sections aren’t necessarily mirror images of one another, but instead add additional context to many scenes and allow us to witness specific events from divergent angles. Not only do we see how the sequence of major events and conversations differs in each woman’s mind, but also the smaller, more barbed moments. What might seem a nervous joke to one woman is a bitchy dig to the other, an act that might be meant as a show of affection from one read as an instrument of control by her rival. A perceived slight that one woman obsesses over is barely noticed by the other in her version of the story. 

The show is at its best when it focuses on these uncomfortable moments where the lines between things like truth, intention, and memory get blurred. If each woman is the villain in the other’s story, who are we, as viewers, meant to believe? To be rooting for? At first, The Girlfriend is deliciously slippery on this score, allowing both Cooke and Wright to gamely tackle playing multiple interpretations of many of the same actions, a challenge both actors are more than up for. The chemistry between them is crackling, and both are fully committed to every unhinged choice their characters make.