Killing Eve Season 1 Review: Not Your Average Spy-Thriller!

The Golden Age of television has blessed us with great TV dramas like Barry, Atlanta, and Legion, to name a few. Killing Eve is one such byproduct of this ongoing renaissance and with good reason. Adapted by Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag) from Luke Jennings’ novel Codename Villanelle, this Europe-set BBC America drama series is currently in its second season and has been renewed for a third already. The show has been praised by critics and audience alike, with Sandra Oh winning the Golden Globe for her portrayal.

To a casual viewer, it might appear as just another run-of-the-mill spy and assassin affair, albeit set in a more picturesque Europe, with Sandra Oh’s titular Eve chasing around Jodie Comer’s Villanelle, a brutal and proficient assassin. However, it will be a fool’s errand to dismiss it as such, as this series is more than just a cat-and-mouse chase with a few deviations from the usual genre machinations. It is also a brilliant character study of two complicated and queer females who first become fascinated by the other but gradually find themselves in a complex relationship defined by admiration, fear, and longing.

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Eve is a regular staffer working with British Intelligence. She is brilliant, jumpy-but-accurate and hungry for a real challenge but is desk bound; she desperately wants to run along with the big guns in the world of spy-espionage. Her unmatched ability to piece together unrelated information pertaining to a string of international murders leads her to conclude that a single person might be behind them; one female assassin. She is soon fired but piques the interest of Carolyn (Fiona Shaw), who asks her to come work with MI6 to help catch this serial killer. Slowly but surely, she becomes obsessed with finding her and catches Villanelle’s attention, who becomes equally intrigued by her.

Villanelle is played terrifically by Jodie Comer with a Russian-French accent, easily en-raptures a viewer more than Oh. She is stylish, carefree and a flamboyant killer who loves what she does. She is basically a woman-child; an adult-kid who cares little about rules and codes of operation; she brings a playfulness to her actions and always walks away scot-free. She is amoral and lacks empathy, like any other psychopathic serial killer. Perhaps that’s what makes us enjoy her presence more on screen; murderers and their inherent psychologies have always drawn attention from our collective consciousness, maybe because we are all always one bad day away from losing it; this makes us uncomfortable, but always ready for more.

The feminist undertones appear normalized and inherent to this world, a welcome transition from the usually observed inclusion of female leads in entertainment done for the sake of diversity and inclusiveness. These females are complex characters; one can’t simply assign their actions and motivations to their morals and virtues, especially in the case of impulse-driven Villanelle. Towards the end of the series, a similar behavioral attribute awakens in Eve, and although she is more accountable of the two, her actions in the season finale point to a similar absurdity, a blip in her general nature that can’t be narrowed down to one single thing. It is equal parts sexual and psychological.

The drama is a crime-thriller in nature and any further classification is impossible, or rather futile; this is a show that bounces from being absurdly funny to dark and tragic within a matter of minutes and places, all of which is held in place by the lead performances. It flips the genre constants by operating in a woman’s world; besides our protagonists, side characters are also female, while husbands and male colleagues are surprisingly secondary to the proceedings. Such narration has never been seen before on the small screen.

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The show is co-incidentally timed appropriately for the #MeToo generation, a timeliness not lost on Sandra Oh and the creators. Although the real-world might take some time to catch up to the femininity shown in Killing Eve, we all could spoil ourselves by reveling in this extraordinary tale of predator and hunter.

Written by Kaushal Munshi

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