This brilliantly slippery beast of a drama pits an adult son’s girlfriend against his mother in all-out war. Robin Wright is excellent as the parent with an … interesting dynamic with her child. Yikes!
‘T
his one’s different,” a son says to his mother when she teases him about his latest girlfriend. Clever, he says. Stunning, ambitious, funny – “you remind me of her”. Something flickers across Mummy’s face. “She reminds you of me?” she says, and it is not really a question.
Welcome, friends, to The Girlfriend, an adaptation of the excellent psychological thriller by Michelle Frances, and an answer to the question many of us have surely pondered – just how much of an incest vibe can one get away with instilling in a shiny prestige miniseries, and can anyone get Robin Wright to star and make the whole thing disturbingly credible?
The answer to the first half is, “Yikes, quite a lot, starting with a reunion in the family home’s basement pool and catchup chat in the sauna”. The answer to the second is, “Yes you can, and how had we all forgotten how good she is when she spent five years as Claire Underwood in House of Cards? God, who’d be an actor when ungrateful viewers’ memories are so short?”
