Behind Her Eyes is the latest small screen psychological thriller
After the phenomenal success of last year’s The Undoing, our obsession with psychological thrillers is bound to continue, with a raft of binge-worthy releases set for streaming this year.
Louise thinks she has met a nice guy. One of the good ones, a real gentleman. So goes the opening scene of Behind Her Eyes, the latest in the trend of psychological thrillers playing on streaming services right now.
Louise (Simona Brown) is a single mum who hasn’t had much luck when it comes to dating, until a chance meeting in a bar — and about $21 of spilled Macallan whisky — leads her to David (Tom Bateman), a lonely psychiatrist who has just moved to the area and is trying to meet new people.
Louise and David’s meet-cute plays out almost like a romantic comedy. There are sparks, there is flirting, there are drinks and there’s even a kiss.
But because Behind Her Eyes is a psychological thriller, you know that it’s all going to end in tears. Because David has a wife at home: Adele, played by Bono’s daughter Eve Hewson, whom you might have seen before in HBO’s hospital period drama The Knick, or the Oscar-nominated Tom Hanks film Bridge Of Spies. It would appear that David is keeping secrets from his wife. And Adele is keeping things from him, too.
Behind Her Eyes is a six episode miniseries adapted from the best-selling thriller by Sarah Pinborough. The novel has what Netflix is calling “that ending” — a third act turn so spoilery that we can’t even begin to get into what it might entail. Suffice to say that this story is dark, dealing with subjects of addiction, grief, night terrors and adultery. A television show about how it really is impossible to know what’s going on inside someone else’s head. Maybe.
“There’s something fantasist about watching other people’s lives go to shit in psychological thrillers, which makes you feel better about your own,” admits Pinborough. Throughout the three COVID lockdowns in the UK, she has veered from binge-watching dark mysteries such as The Undoing to palate cleansers like the fizzy American sitcom Superstore.
“I write dark stuff, so I tend to go the other way,” she explains, though she does feel that
Netflix’s adaptation of her novel is a happy middle ground. “Behind Her Eyes is very heightened, it’s very arch. It’s sexy and fun. It reminds us that when all this is over we can go out and fuck up our lives again.”
Psychological thrillers, mastered by Alfred Hitchcock, have never been far from fashion in cinema. Natalie Portman won an Oscar for Darren Aronofsky’s capturing of the genre with Black Swan in 2010.
Two years later Gillian Flynn unleashed the hounds with Gone Girl. That book, which sold 15 million copies, and the accompanying film adaptation turbocharged the appetite for gritty, grim thrillers on the big and small screens.
There was Emily Blunt’s The Girl On The Train, a film adapted from Paula Hawkins’ novel of the same name in 2016 and Amy Adams’ television series Sharp Objects, based on a pre-Gone Girl Flynn book, in 2018. In 2021, Adams will revisit the genre in Netflix’s The Woman In The Window, a thriller about an agoraphobic who witnesses a murder, in which she co-stars alongside Julianne Moore and Gary Oldman.
On 19 April Mare of Easttown, a gritty procedural led by Kate Winslet and Guy Pierce, will drop onto Binge. The miniseries marks Winslet’s return to television, with the Oscar-winning actress starring as Mare, a small-town detective forced to revisit her own past as she races against the clock to solve a murder.
The series is hoping to replicate the success of last year’s blockbuster hit The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, which also streamed on Binge in Australia (and HBO in the US) and has been nominated for four Golden Globes. Kidman starred as Grace Fraser, a therapist and marriage counsellor caught in a web of lies woven by her husband Jonathan (Grant).
Every episode twisted and turned until it reached an inevitable cliffhanger, leaving viewers desperate for more. No wonder, then, that The Undoing‘s finale drew in more than three million viewers, the biggest audience ratings for HBO since Big Little Lies.
Behind several of these recent psychological thriller adaptations — Gone Girl, The Undoing, and this week’s Tell Me Your Secrets, streaming from today on Amazon Prime Video — is Australian producer Bruna Papandrea. Her company Made Up Stories has been quietly purchasing the rights to the biggest books in the market and turning them into binge-worthy, addictive television shows.
The Undoing was one such success, and her latest project Tell Me Your Secrets, about a mother desperately searching for her missing daughter, and a mysterious woman who may have the answers she seeks, is hoping for similar success. Both series star Lily Rabe, the star of American Horror Story and Barry Jenkins’ forthcoming Underground Railroad miniseries. In The Undoing, she played Sylvia, an Upper East Side lawyer and best friend to Nicole Kidman’s Grace. In Tell Me Your Secrets she plays Emma, a woman who survived a run in with a dangerous killer.
For Rabe, the genre of psychological thriller is enticing even, and perhaps especially, as we live through a global pandemic. Our desire for escapism when it comes to our entertainment is high, yes, but so is our desire to connect to people. A psychological thriller is perfectly placed to put you inside the lives of others, after a year when some of our opportunities for human connection were taken away.
After The Undoing premiered last year, Rabe was inundated with theories about the show, something she found “particularly rewarding”. “It was like this unexpected gift,” she enthuses. “We try to find these ways to connect and these buoying moments in such a complicated time, [and] it was such a thrill to read about theories from strangers.”
And not just strangers, she says, but loved ones, too. “I also had people in my life, people who I talk to all the time, and people I hadn’t heard from in years, calling and texting and emailing and, sort of, threatening me, if I didn’t give them the information that they wanted,” she adds, laughing. “Which of course I didn’t do.”
She didn’t even tell her boyfriend, fellow actor Hamish Linklater — and her co-star in Tell Me Your Secrets — keeping her lips sealed about Elena Alves’ murderer as they watched each of the miniseries’ six episodes together.
Rabe believes that psychological thrillers are in the “sweet spot for viewing” right now. “Something that has a bit of escapism and will take you somewhere,” Rabe explains, whether it’s The Undoing’s snow-dusted New York, Behind Her Eyes’ wide London streets in the full blush of an English heatwave or the vibrant city of New Orleans in Tell Me Your Secrets. “But also, you want to watch a show where you care about the people,” she adds. For her, both The Undoing and Tell Me your Secrets have a “wonderful, escapist ride element to them,” while still being “grounded in the relationships in them,” she explains.
A psychological thriller is only as good as its characters and those relationships that unfold onscreen. You don’t have to like the characters — and we as a collective television-watching public certainly didn’t like Hugh Grant’s smarmy doctor Jonathan Fraser. But you do have to care about them, in the sense that you want to know about their lives, their thoughts and feelings, and all the factors that made them into the people they are today. You need to want to spend a whole miniseries getting inside their head.
This is the meat of the genre, the real thrilling aspect of a psychological thriller. Who is this person? Why are they like this? What don’t I know about them? They’re the same questions that Louise is asking, all through Behind Her Eyes, as she is drawn further and further into the twisted web of David and Adele’s not-quite-right marriage.
When done right, a psychological thriller answers those questions in a way that is compulsive and truly binge-worthy. In Behind Her Eyes, that twist ending takes it to another level entirely, leaving you either totally flummoxed or completely furious.
Pinborough calls it a “marmite” ending. “I had the ending in my head before I started writing,” she said, and stuck to her guns even when her editor expressed concern about how difficult it would be to pull it off — and, later, when producers considering adaptation wanted to change the ending entirely.
“I don’t mind when people hate it, because everyone is allowed to hate stuff,” Pinborough says, sanguine. She’s right: the story’s final about face is a conversation starter, no matter how you feel about its execution.
“I was as curious as anyone else as to how they would do that on television,” muses Pinborough. “I got to the end and I was quite chill, and then I went to have a shower and I was still thinking about it and it was going around in my head, and then I went to bed and I was still thinking about it. And then I thought: I made this up! Why am I so freaked out,” she says, laughing.
“It’s quite something to read it, and quite something to write it, but seeing it — they’ve done it really, really well.”
Behind Her Eyes is streaming now on Netflix. Tell Me Your Secrets is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video. The Mare of Easttown will stream on Binge from 19 April.