This glossy murder mystery, starring Elisabeth Moss, Kerry Washington and Kate Mara, should be better than this. But if you brace yourself for a perfectly acceptable eight hours of entertainment, you’ll have a good time
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ou can’t say Imperfect Women doesn’t warn you. It is clear from the very first shots – three women dancing, drunkenly but happily, laughing but not scream-laughing, as the camera whirls round their beautifully lit selves – and the first line – an earnest voiceover about “a kinship from deep in our souls” – what we’re in for. That is, an overwritten, far-fetched, glossy but derivative murder mystery – a descendant of Big Little Lies, intermarried with touches of everything else Nicole Kidman has done in the last 10 years.
Adjust your expectations accordingly and you’ll have a perfectly acceptable eight hours of entertainment. Dwell on the fact that you could well have expected better of an Apple TV production and a main cast that includes Kerry Washington, Elisabeth Moss and Kate Mara and you’ll have less of a good time. So don’t do that.
Enjoy instead the comforts of familiarity. We open, à la Big Little Lies, in the middle of a police interview after one of the dancing women has been murdered. But who? Kerry Washington – playing an intergenerationally wealthy philanthropist, Eleanor – is the one being interviewed, so it’s not her. It’s … Kate Mara, AKA Nancy, the trophy wife of an intergenerationally wealthy non-philanthropist, Robert (Joel Kinnaman).
