Reviews Series / Killing Eve

Entertaining but Utterly Ridiculous

So Killing Eve is back and it's the same as ever. Sensual, funny, overall entertaining but very, very silly. If you're not in the know, the whole show is based around a psychosexual lesbian romance between an intelligence officer, the titular Eve, (Sandra Oh) and a comically competent Russian-accented assassin, 'Villanelle' (Jodie Comer) who are stuck in a constant cat-and-mouse game. The narrative bends backwards over itself to facilitate this admittedly quite fascinating relationship at the expense of all plot and common sense. The supposedly well-trained intelligence officers all act like morons 24/7. Meanwhile, Villanelle is somehow everywhere, all the time, and has an amazing talent for doing criminal shit in plain sight and never getting caught.

The show has a serious stakes problem because it is made clear early on that Villanelle has no real interest in "killing Eve". Villanelle can basically teleport wherever she wants usually in some fabulously gaudy disguise to boot, a power that she can use to effortlessly track down Eve several times over the course of the series for yet another sexually charged chitchat session, but she will never face consequences for her actions. She's an entertaining character, but the constant jokes about her casual attitudes towards sex and murder get old after so long. While Comer flexes some unexpected comedic chops, Sandra Oh gives easily the most gripping performance, regardless of how shallow the surrounding material may be. The episodes where Eve and Villanelle blatantly team up are the best. The whole show should purely be about that instead of all this artificial, thrillery-dillery intrigue. What's worse is that one gets the impression that the creators genuinely think they're creating a genius, cryptic work of fine art, which may be in the production value and score, but it certainly isn't in the writing department. It's a shame because Phoebe Waller-Bridge is an incredible writer under the right circumstances.

But it's... funny, I guess. However, the show is nowhere near as deep or dramatic as the marketing materials would have you believe. Villanelle can be threatening to torture someone while asking them for a shepherd's pie recipe. If you want a gritty, realistic forensic thriller like the adverts seem so intent on having us believe, this is most definitely not the show to turn to. The main issue with the show is the overly self-indulgent writing.