Early episodes of “Killing Eve” hummed with the glamorous thrills of savage deeds. Changing costumes with the briskness of Sydney Bristow on “Alias,” the assassin Villanelle liquidated one target in a villa under the Tuscan sun, gassed another in a clinical Berlin sex dungeon, and intermittently returned to Paris to squabble with her handler, with a maliciousness that masqueraded as affection. The character, played by Jodie Comer, was inspired toward the nom de guerre Villanelle by the label on a decadent perfume. The name is off-putting at first glance—and even at third or fourth, if you are not familiar with the Luke Jennings novels on which the series is based. It’s a bad pun on “villainess,” a name for a Bond girl. But as the show went on and its idiosyncrasies flourished, it gave a pleasing shock to see that Villanelle is no stock figure. The character lured her audience into a show that earns affection by sidestepping expectations. The first two episodes of “Killing Eve” achieved liftoff by stealing stylish moves from international intrigues; since then, though, the show has entered its eccentric orbit as an interior drama, gloss giving way to emotional grit.
The element of surprise was lurking early on: the agent on Villanelle’s trail, Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), describes her to a sketch artist with lavish reference to honey-blond hair, delicate features, long neck, full lips, bright skin. Eve loses herself in the lost look in Villanelle’s eyes: “She was totally focussed yet almost entirely inaccessible.” To which the sketch artist says, “So is that like a square face or an oval face?” His practical question deflates the reverie wonderfully; the moment feels at once ridiculous and freighted with mystery. And it hints at a key to the effusive response to the series thus far: it fulfills a desire for a cops-and-killer show that is drawn—with fine lines and a free hand—to satisfy much more than the male gaze.
The showrunner, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, came to prominence as the creator and star of “Fleabag,” about a single woman blundering through London. The show smuggled poignancy into the frame under a blackly comic cover of dirty jokes; there was grief beneath the clowning. “Killing Eve” achieves its pathos by exploiting and subverting various tropes of the thriller, and likewise catches a surprising tone, toggling between Eve’s pedestrian anxieties and her action-hero fears. Eve works in London at M.I.5, where she pushes paper and takes orders while quietly nursing an interest in the psychology of female contract killers. We are subtly misled to think of Eve, struggling with her overcoat and her hangover, as another of the damaged investigators familiar from the screen, where the distinction between detectives and deviants is ever in threat of collapse. But Eve only becomes damaged within the course of the season. She begins as a healthy, mild-mannered weirdo with obsessions to nurture and a spouse to placate. Instead, the archetype of the haunted investigator is incarnated, with a droll sense of distance, by Fiona Shaw, whose character hires Eve to follow her hunches about Villanelle for M.I.6.
As the paths of the cop and he killer converge, small gestures—many of them adolescent in nature—carry serious weight. Villanelle’s cleverness of technique is married to a deformed sort of teen-aged impudence. The character is in her mid-twenties, but between the formative years spent in prison and her antisocial tendencies, she reads as an unsupervised brat with strong firearms skills. When her handler, concerned about her stability, calls her off a job, she pouts, “But this one has asthma. You know I like the breathy ones.” Comer grounds the character’s psychopathy in a combination of neediness and petulance that tilts the viewer off balance.
The story spirals away from the gun-metal existentialism of Villanelle’s situation, away from the observational comedy of Eve’s life as a detective in over her head, into a life independent of genre conventions. The triumph of Waller-Bridge’s style is in its reconciliation of the outlandish and the intimate. The Jason Bourne-style escapism of the bare premise, inflected by the assertively odd tone, yields fresh depictions of fear and grief. Critics and fans have noted that Villanelle, significantly, does not often act as a temptress in the course of the plot. Rather than seducing and betraying, she tends to prefer infiltrating and annihilating. She is instead seductive in her confidence and her competence, a temptress with an apple that tastes of unexpected knowledge.
Sourse: newyorker.com
