Has anyone got to the end of Malice yet? I’m halfway through – at the time of writing, anyway – and am dearly hoping that I might bump into someone at a party who will blurt out all the plot details and spare me the misery of having to sit it out to the bitter end.
The Fawn thinks I’m being a wuss, grumbling that I never used to be this squeamish about gory, psychologically harrowing torture-porn TV. Maybe so, but the older I get, the more I wonder: what am I actually gaining by spending six hours on a sofa writhing my way through a horrid story about a made-up psychopath doing terrible things to a made-up family and their made-up pets? Wouldn’t I be better just re-reading Anna Karenina?
Anyway, Malice, for those of you who haven’t yet succumbed, features an unlikely screen stand-off between Old Marlburian comic Jack Whitehall and former X-Files star David Duchovny. Duchovny plays Jamie Tanner, a grisly American bruiser who has got rich being ruthless in private equity and now has an ex-supermodel for his second wife, a lovely house in Greece, and a huge pad in west London. Whitehall plays the family ‘manny’ who may not be all he claims to be.
Actually, why be so coy with the plot summary? Almost from the moment you meet him, Whitehall’s character Adam Healey screams ‘I’m creepy and deranged. Do not leave your children with me! Or your kittens and handsome white dog!’. Plus, the opening scene (most of it takes place in flashback) shows him being detained at a US airport and questioned about the murder of a family for whom he recently worked. So don’t worry, I’m not spoiling anything –much as you might later come to wish that I had done.
But the problem with Healey being so obviously suspect right from the off is that you have no time to chill and enjoy the pretty Greek scenery (Paros) and the acidic social commentary. It’s like White Lotus, only with all the fun removed.
One of the joys of White Lotus is that the first half of each new season feels like taking a free holiday somewhere very expensive and exotic, with plenty of space to people-watch and slosh down a few cocktails in the pool of your private villa, before the serious business of the doom-plot kicks in and you watch, transfixed but also lightly amused, as it all unravels and everyone goes to hell. With Malice on the other hand you’ve got your testicles trapped in the vice right from the off, which means you can never relax.
It’s like The White Lotus, only with all the fun removed
None of the characters is particularly likeable: Dad is a bullying predator, Mum (Carice van Houten) is so jaded she doesn’t stop reading her magazine while her husband takes her from behind for some opportunist holiday sex, the teenage kids are bolshie, even the nanny is stroppy and lazy. Time in their company is not pleasant and you know, because of all the scenes where Whitehall leers and lurks and goldfish-stares like someone overdoing Iago’s asides in the house play competition, that it’s only going to get worse.
As indeed it does: poisonings, betrayals, someone being bashed to death with a cricket bat. It’s excruciating to watch and all the more painful because it seems so vindictive and unnecessary. All right, so it’s hinted early on that Healey has been unhinged by the death of his father which, for some reason, he blames on Tanner. But this backstory feels as though it has been added on as an afterthought in order to make Healey’s calculating acts of cruelty seem less motivelessly malign.
So the viewer is left floundering, uncertain with whom to identify. As the series develops, the nasty suspicion begins to arise that maybe you’re being invited to root for the psycho, not because he’s in any way sympathetic, but just because he’s so good at what he does: deploying that English public-school charm (Whitehall, is of course, playing himself here, as he always does) to such devastating effect that even as you’re destroying everyone around you you’re the last person they suspect.
This is why, having now collected my thoughts in the space of writing this review, I’ve decided I’m going to stop watching Malice. It gives me the same nasty taste in my mouth I got from that noisome series The Fall, where the serial killer brutally murdered lots of innocent woman, but, worry not girls, he’s played by Jamie Dornan and he’s just gorgeous! And don’t get me started on Killing Eve.
All these shows are the product of a sick culture. Or rather they are part of the deliberate ensickification of our culture. Enough! We should vote with our off buttons and just say ‘No’ to this slickly vile, desensitising nihilism.
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