Phoebe Waller-Bridge's eight part thriller Killing Eve was gripping, intriguing, violent, pretty brutal in places, highly stylised, and often very confusing (many plot lines were left unresolved, leaving plenty of scope for a second series), and I enjoyed it very much indeed.
It wasn't a realistic show (it was far more in hock to Breaking Bad's flights of fancy than The Wire's precise autopsy of dangerous lives dangerously lived) but it didn't need to be. This could lead to criticisms of Killing Eve being style over content and such criticisms would not be completely inaccurate, but, oh, what style it had.
The exquisitely choreographed murders, the ornate bathtubs, the retro radios, the Abstract Expressionist prints hanging from the walls of Parisian apartments as oh-so-trendy ye-ye music blasts out, the clever camera angles, and some of the wonderful outfits Jodie Comer gets to wear.
The locations too. This is as much a travelogue as a thriller, though the amount of grisly murders going down may put you off booking your next Ryanair flight to any of the places involved. Paris, as mentioned, is all tasteful art and artifice. Vienna is, of course, a city of chic cafes and strawberry ice creams. Tuscany:- cypress trees, sunshine, and yellow paint peeling off the walls of villas that are the very much the last word in faded glamour. London actually looks a bit like the London I inhabit (or at least the bits I visit) and Moscow is portrayed, perhaps somewhat negatively, as a city of imposing Soviet tower blocks, grey skies, constant drizzle, dark prison cells, amorality and ultraviolence.
The music, also, is always ubercool (some times I suspect they're trying a bit too hard, a little bit too tasteful - you're not gonna find any of Hixxy and Sharkey's happy hardcore here). Alongside the aforementioned ye-ye of Francoise Hardy and Brigitte Bardot, sad bangers by acts like Cigarettes After Sex, Cat's Eyes, and The Kills are very much the order of the day. The only real outlier is Evil Woman by The Troggs. Killing Eve is not a show that indulges in diegetic sounds.
It all begins with Eve Polastri (a constantly flustered and tired looking Sandra Oh) waking from a bad dream. Then she's in MI5 with a hangover, chatting to her fresh and enthusiastic colleague Elena (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) about Russian sex traffickers over croissants.
We jump to the life of Villanelle (Jodie Comer), a callous (though hot, well dressed, and clearly a criminal mastermind) contract killer who zips round the continent (Bulgaria, Germany) shooting people, stabbing people, poisoning people, and, in the case of poor Colonel Zhang Wu in Berlin, clamping his testicles tightly and chopping his knob off. The revelation of which is followed, cheekily, by a scene of someone cooking sausages.
Soon Eve, Elena, Bill (David Haig), Kenny (Sean Delaney), and the sour faced Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) are on the trail of Villanelle who by now we've learned receives her assignments from the avuncular, but suspicious, silver fox figure of Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) who appears to represent a somewhat shady organisation who operate under the gnomic and economic title of 'the twelve'.
But if you're looking for resolution, you've come to the wrong place. Each unravelling of the plot only serves to further obfuscate matters and some of the leading characters switch sides as easily as they cross borders. Nobody's motivation is ever entirely clear but as Eve's hunt for Villanelle becomes an obsession we're plunged into a succession of nailbiting chases, Mexican stand-offs, and double crossing, all underpinned with a sometimes latent, sometimes blatant, sexual tension that leaves nobody in any doubt why Killing Eve became such a firm favourite with lesbians.
There were some excellent cliffhanger endings and I was never quite sure what was going to happen next. Which makes Killing Eve the perfect drama, in many ways, for the uncertain times we find ourselves living in. The idea of nobody trusting anybody else does seem to fuel a lot of real life now so it's only right that it is reflected in our drama. The pattern of, and the reason for, the kills seems to suggest the intention of destabilising from the ground up with the aim of creating maximum chaos. Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin could almost have been script consultants!
Certainly Bannon and Dugin's methodology should send a chill up any right thinking person's back just as effectively as Waller-Bridge regularly does with Killing Eve. To me the dialogue, initially, seemed to be trying overly hard to be loaded with pertinent cultural references, humour, AND exposition (which made it a bit tough going, though, for me, most things are) but by the second episode I'd settled in for a rollercoaster ride and had learned to accept that I was looking at a hyperreal, rather than real, world where all dialogue is expedient and everybody in it is simultaneously exactly who they say they are while at the same time being someone else completely.
Moments of lightness come in Villanelle's slightly robotic sex scene with the innocent romantic Sebastian (Charlie Hamblett), some of the more cockamamie dialogue, and trying to work out if Frank (Darren Boyd) looks more like Jurgen Klopp or Matt Berninger from The National but it's for the drama, the thrills, and the chills that you come to Killing Eve and they're the reasons you stay hooked too.
Maximum credit to Phoebe Waller-Bridge for adapting Luke Jenning's novel Codename Villenelle into such a suspenseful piece and hat tips too to all the cast but especially Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Kim Bodnia, Darren Boyd, and Fiona Shaw (Owen McDonnell as Niko is sadly underused, much like his character) for helping make Killing Eve an ensemble piece when it could, quite easily, have become a two woman show.
But it is, of course, Comer and Oh who dominate every scene they're in. They're both superb. As Eve, Oh undertakes a journey not just around Europe and not just in pursuit of a killer, but also to the heart of her own sexuality, soul, and motivations and the often pained expressions on her face portray this ferociously.
Comer gets the most fun gig of all. She gets to do most of the violent stuff. She gets to constantly fuck men over, play around with a host of accents, wigs, and outfits, and even when she appears to be letting light in we're still never sure if this is just a trick and if her heart is truly dark and cold. Killing Eve was dark, alright, but it was never cold.
"So, what do you want to do now?"
"I want to kill her. With my bare hands".
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