This article discusses the first four episodes of Prime Video’s The Girlfriend.
The typical domestic thriller demands a certain willing suspension of disbelief. To enjoy these shows, you have to accept that a wealthy matriarch and the less-privileged but invariably stunning woman her son brings home will always be mortal enemies. You can’t doubt that a reasonably intelligent person could cohabitate with a psychopath for decades without realizing something was amiss. Both of the above are required of viewers who tune in to The Girlfriend, a six-episode series now streaming in full on Amazon. If you’re the kind of person who regularly breezes through stuff like this, as I unfortunately am, this is no obstacle to a satisfying binge.
The trouble comes halfway through the season, when The Girlfriend, having already dazzled us with several preposterous twists, violates not only the logic of life as actual human beings experience it but also the fundamental facts of the soapy alternate reality it inhabits. One of the show’s two warring divas does something absolutely monstrous—though not, as we’re coming to understand by the time she does it, out of character. But her adversary’s response defies everything we know about the kind of person that woman is, leaving a plot hole big enough to derail the entire series.
Adapted from a novel by Michelle Frances, The Girlfriend has a familiar premise. A medical student, Daniel Sanderson (Laurie Davidson), introduces the woman he’s dating—seriously, for once—to his parents. Cherry Laine (Olivia Cooke) is a real estate agent who doubles down on her ridiculous name with berry-hued hair and a wardrobe that favors crimson and burgundy. While her background is vague at first, it’s clear that she’s a stranger to Daniel’s super-rich world. His dad, Howard (Waleed Zuaiter), is a hotel magnate; his mom, Laura (executive producer Robin Wright, who directed half the season), has her own gallery. At 27, Daniel still lives in his parents’ palatial London home but has enlisted Cherry to help him find his own place.
In one of the series’ earliest scenes, he playfully pounces on Laura in their indoor pool. Immediately, we sense some Oedipal tension between mother and son. Still, it’s Cherry who initially raises more red flags. Through Laura’s protective eyes, this striver who has gotten her claws into Daniel is conniving, hypersexual, possibly a thief, definitely a liar. That neither he nor Howard seems to see what she sees only makes her more desperate to keep this interloper away from their family. And in fairness, Cherry does a few objectively unhinged things. But the central conceit of The Girlfriend is that it alternates between Laura’s perspective and Cherry’s. As we get to know both characters better, it starts to look like Laura, in what is soon revealed to be a full-on obsession with Daniel, could actually be the more dangerous of the two women.
That suspicion is confirmed (or was for me, at least) at the end of Episode 3. Daniel, having fallen off the side of a mountain on a rock-climbing trip with Cherry, is in the hospital, unconscious and fighting for his life. Though it’s apparent to viewers that his injury was an accident—and his own fault, if anyone’s—Laura orders Howard to banish Cherry from his bedside. After ignoring her repeated calls for news on Daniel’s progress, Laura finally picks up the phone. “I’m so sorry,” she tells Cherry. “Daniel’s gone. He died this morning.” In truth, he’s just been taken off the ventilator and resumed breathing on his own.
Only a sociopath or a sadist could tell a lie of this magnitude, but again, such broad characters are par for the course in shows like this. In any case, for a few minutes, it looks like even Laura has realized that she went too far. Episode 4 opens with her point of view, as she drives to the apartment where her son and his girlfriend were supposed to live together, to confess to Cherry that Daniel is still alive. But when she arrives to find Cherry looking as though she’d been partying all night, spots Daniel’s credit card out as though it’s been recently used, and—the last straw—Cherry tells her that Daniel proposed before his fall, Laura can’t do it. She salts the wound by pretending that the family already had a funeral for Daniel, and Cherry wasn’t invited.
What’s impossible to accept is Cherry’s response to her would-be mother-in-law’s lies. She grieves. She buys Daniel a suit for a funeral she has yet to hear anything about (a flimsy explanation for the credit card and her late, disheveled arrival to meet Laura, but sure). She follows Laura home to harangue her about excluding Cherry from the memorial. She goes clubbing in an attempt to dance away her sorrows, only to run into Daniel’s friend Brigitte (Shalom Brune-Franklin), who believes Cherry abandoned him. (They speak vaguely enough about his fate that neither realizes Laura told them different things.) And when Laura, who has been hiding a slowly recovering Daniel at their estate in Spain and intercepting his texts to Cherry, hacks into Cherry’s social media account and posts a rant that gets her fired, Cherry simply moves back home and starts working at her mother’s (Karen Henthorn) butcher shop.
Not once do we see her, say, google “Daniel Sanderson” in search of an obituary—and there certainly would be at least one published tribute to the son of a prominent London businessman and a gallerist famous enough to be mocked on the cover of an art magazine. Not to mention the flurry of social media posts that would follow the death of any young, well-connected person. Sure, Laura sneakily blocks Daniel from Cherry’s Instagram (or the show’s generic equivalent), though that scene seems to take place at least a few days after his supposed demise. But that isn’t the same as wiping his entire existence from the internet as Cherry knows it. Nor would it stop Cherry from proactively contacting anyone who knows Daniel, from Brigitte to Howard.
Because here is what we know about Cherry: She is obsessive and mistrustful and extreme. An amusing, if unlikely, sequence in the premiere has her harvesting an animal’s heart at the butcher shop, then walking away in a baker’s uniform after it splatters her ex and his new wife with blood when they cut into their wedding cake. (How did a real estate agent get hired for this gig? How could no one have seen her mix a giant, bleeding organ into the batter? Who cares!) And here is what we know about her relationship with Laura: Aside from a brief truce in Episode 2, they’ve been scrapping over Daniel since the moment they met. “I want you to stay away from my son,” Laura hisses at Cherry after seeing the cake video, which has gone viral. Her greeting to Cherry upon arriving at Daniel’s hospital room: “I don’t want you in here.” Given all of the above, I have not a shred of doubt that Cherry would make some effort to independently verify Daniel’s death.
The Girlfriend was never intended to be a work of high art. And I had enough fun with it to keep racing through to the (decent) finale. Wright’s and Cooke’s appropriately scenery-chomping performances alone justify the binge. But after Episode 4, I lost faith that the plot would come together in accordance with the scripts’ internal logic—and especially that it would make any sense at all in light of the characters’ derangement, which is in fact the series’ whole reason for being. There was just no longer a point in trying to game out twists that might not have a basis in anything that came before them. And that robbed the viewing experience of some enjoyment. Just because a show isn’t aiming for realism doesn’t mean it can get away with randomness.