The Girlfriend Review: Olivia Cooke & Robin Wright Deliver a Gripping Psychological Drama

The Girlfriend Review: James Brown once sang, “It’s a man’s man’s man’s world, but it would be nothing without a woman or a girl.” The Girlfriend not to live through 2025 The cancel culture, Lyrics may not survive that. Women to a man have always been central to his world mother, nurse, teacher, lover. He may or may not like it, but women can make, redeem or ruin him with a thread through his life. And because he feels that it is in his own hands to decide whether to live or not, he is a fool. Women are silent, however, and run the world. The Girlfriend lives by that fact, revolving around two female characters struggling with ownership of a boy- or more accurately a mama boy- who is yet to mature into a man.

The Girlfriend is as in a neat psychological thriller on paper: Laura Sanderson (Robin Wright) is terrified that her son Daniel (Laurie Davidson) is falling under the influence of Cherry Laine (Olivia Cooke), a girlfriend who might or might not be dangerous. However in the performance, it turns into something much more knotted, more of a psychological tug-of-war of the dark in which love, paranoia, manipulation become one and the same, utterly irresistible and disgusting.

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The intentions of the series become apparent at one of the very first shots. The meeting between Laura and Daniel does not occur at a dinner table, at a warm-up living room, but on the bottom of the family home pool. They drink beers in their swimsuits, and then hang in the sauna, and Daniel confesses timorously that he has someone new. His effort at making Cherry stand out distinctly against the crowd- “You remind me of her- happens to be soon cut short by the frozen look on Laura’s face with her reply- She reminds me of you. This is not just a mother-son relationship, it is a portrait of intimacy and attachment that is sketched with such blurred lines that it leaves the viewer uneasy. Their relationship is neither illegal nor overtly sexual, however, the manner in which Laura and Daniel engage, the casualness of their proximity, the absence of distance between them makes us subconsciously uncomfortable. The show banks on that uneasiness purposely, and it challenges us to doubt not their motives, but the level of their addiction to each other.

The genius of The Girlfriend lies in the fact that it does not give simple solutions. Is Cherry a manipulative schemer who is working her way to wealth and status and power? Or is it that Laura is the crazed mother who does not allow her son to mature? The episodes are repeated in a cyclic manner recounting the moments in changing perspectives. What appears to one observer like a seduction, becomes innocent in the eyes of another; what one experiences as paranoia, immediately becomes true. Both Daniel and the audience are pulled this way and that way, being manipulated in every direction.

The best of the lot are the first three episodes which are directed by Wright herself. Wright understands how to prepare the stage: she constructs the system of suspicion and desire with accuracy, providing us with real, dangerous people and not archetypes. Her Laura is an interesting paradox, cold graceful and yet so possessive and a mother who simply cannot afford to lose the love of her son. Across her, Olivia Cooke brings to life Cherry as a spiral of alluring and playful, a female whose smile can be interpreted in two ways: loving or manipulative. Their dynamic is electric. The moments of conflict between the two are duels, hesitant at the beginning, exchanging offensive words and stares, and then bursting into open enmity. It is to hear Wright and Cooke fencing, to see two schoolboy actors delight in the peeling off of the civility of their characters, layer after layer of poison.

There is no better thing that The Girlfriend does, than manipulation. The show is nearly playful in the manner it is playing with its viewers. Each scene you see appears to be reliable till the next scene restarts it in a different position, in a different point of view and it makes you doubt yourself. Who is lying? Who is deluded? Who, if anyone, can be believed? It is also the best trick and at different moments, the worst trick of the show. On the one hand, it maintains thriller throughout six episodes so that the viewers are not bored. Conversely, the repetition at times can be hedonistic, stretching out the moments which would have perhaps hit a bit harder had they been left vague. Nevertheless, the confusion itself is thrilling, in the understanding that the show has snared you into its web as successfully as Laura or Cherry snared Daniel into theirs.

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The exhibition is not afraid of being steamy, but is never eroticism that is only skin deep. Rather, it is weaponised - - desire is a weapon, intimacy a battlefield. As Daniel gazes upon Cherry we are left to wonder whether it is love or magic. When Laura places her hand on the shoulder of her son or when she hangs around us too much we discomposure she is being too protective, we wonder whether there is something much more stifling behind her affections.

This uneasiness is what the series is about. The Girlfriend not only bothers or upsets, but it also bothers the way we feel as the audience of the action. We are involved, sucked into the judgment, decision, scepticism, as Daniel is. When the finale comes, with a showdown that degenerates into tragedy, the viewer is as deluded as any of the characters. The Girlfriend is not able to avoid entirely indulgence and relaxation, even with its psychological hold. The second half of the series occasionally runs out of energy, after the narrow path of Wright first episodes, overemphasizing melodramatic chords. Some twists are clichéd and the man, Daniel, meant to be the focus of this tug of war, is sometimes underdeveloped, rather than a man, a rope between two entities pulling it.

But even where it is weak you find the series keeping you alive. It is fashionably filmed and the lavish feeling of location highlights the high stakes of upper crust and wealth. And it never ceases to put its main, uneasy question: when two women are struggling over a man to his life, how much of their struggle is over his love, and how much over his power?

The Girlfriend is a psychological thriller that is more seductive and disturbing at the same time. It is a tale of ladies trapped in a battle of dominance, in a stylish, intense, and ready to make its viewers squirm. It is diabolically charming, a play which has the deepestest secret of them all: men can be sure that the world belongs to them, but they can be sure that women are the ones who are holding the threads.

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