Cheap as bleep movie#
There are flashes of a better, sleeker show within this scatter of political, social and emotional ideas: the psychological realism of Emily’s freeze response when she first encounters Clive, the decision to give Sara (Bre Francis), the mother of Clive’s child, a backstory of her own, the snippet of a lurid TV movie about Alison’s death.
At least Clive, known on Saint X as Gogo, gets some emotional depth, though this is often starkly communicated via silent scowling or punchbag-wearing anger.
Cheap as bleep series#
The expansive cast and roving scenes at the resort’s breakfast bar invokes, unfortunately for Saint X, the excellent series The White Lotus – all the perspectives but none of the intrigue or subtlety. That’s still not getting to any of the secondary characters at the Saint X resort, all of whom are thinly sketched and mostly archetypical – the drunk single mom, the nice awkward guy, the pervy middle-age crisis dude in an unhappy marriage, the cloying pregnant wife, the chipper gay couple on vacation. (The answer is ultimately delivered on the other, vaguely early 2000s timeline at the resort – not to be confused with three characters’ separate flashback timelines, which are coded sepia and gray and, though ambitious, altogether too much.) (“Is it hard living in a Caribbean neighborhood?” her therapist asks – little in this show is subtle.) A chance encounter with a cab driver, Clive (Josh Bonzie), one of two Black resort service workers last seen with Alison the night she died (the other being Edwin, played by Jayden Elijah), prompts an obsessive spiral she attempts to befriend the gruff, emotionally locked down Clive and deceive him into revealing what happened. In the present – cue, for her entrance, Doja Cat’s Woman – Emily is a documentary film editor who has avoided the Reddit threads dedicated to her sister and recently moved to New York’s Caribbean neighborhood of Flatbush with her perfectly understanding boyfriend, Josh (Pico Alexander).Įmily is schooled in therapy-speak and desperate to know the sister she couldn’t understand as a child. The timeline-switching is chaotic, the acting wooden, the pace doleful and the aesthetic cheap-looking.Īt the center of the series, at least for many of the 45-ish minute episodes, is another white girl: Emily Thomas (Alycia Debnam-Carey), a pseudonym for young Claire (Kenlee Anaya Townsend), who was seven years old when her big sister died and who has struggled with a lack of answers ever since. (The death of Alison – an 18-year-old last seen on a Caribbean island in the early 2000s partying with two local boys, turned into a media fixation – is clearly modeled on the 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba.) Unfortunately, its execution muddles the message on almost all levels.
The eight-part series has noble intentions, namely its interest in Black Caribbean characters imperiled by the death of a young white tourist. It then quickly roves elsewhere, on at least four timelines. The pilot, indistinctly directed by Mudbound’s Dee Rees, starts with a body – that of Alison Thomas (West Duchovny, daughter of David and Téa Leoni), a Princeton freshman on holiday with her wealthy New York exurb family on the Caribbean island of Saint X (all gleaned from unrelentingly clunky exposition). The TV adaptation of Saint X, produced by one Aubrey Graham (AKA Drake) and developed by Leila Gerstein, aims to preserve the book’s methods of complicating the dead girl script: multiple perspectives, a curiosity about the impact of a sensationalized murder beyond the immediate family, an uneasy commentary on our collective fascination with true crime.
0 kommentar(er)
