Killing Eve – Review

Cast: Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer, Fiona Shaw, David Haig, Owen McDonnell, Kim Bodnia
Genre: Drama
Unlike its genre predecessors, Killing Eve, starring Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer, features a pair of women who are obsessed with each other in equal measure. The series, which hails from Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is also mostly set in London and has the same irreverent sense of humor and the same intense exploration of the psychology of its lead characters.
Based on the novellas by Luke Jennings, Killing Eve received and early second renewal ahead of its premiere. The series immediately grabs your attention and pulls out all the stops to make sure it doesn’t lose it.
Villanelle (Jodie Comer) is a high-flying murderer, a beautiful young woman with fancy clothes, a Parisian apartment, and lots of disposable income who jaunts around Europe for a job she adores- brutally murdering people.
Even (Oh) is tasked with investigating Villanelle, figuring out who she is and who she works for. Almost as soon as Eve gets this dream job, Villanelle learns that Eve is investigating her. She becomes fascinated with Eve and the pair engage in a cat-and-mouse game where both play the cat and the mouse.
The real strength of Killing Eve comes from its two lead women, who are both fascinating in their own way. Eve and Villanelle seem like complete opposites, but their lives actually parallel each other: women in male-dominated fields, often underestimated and brimming with untapped passion.
Back in a regular starring role on TV for the first time since she left Grey’s Anatomy, Oh slides into the skin of Eve, who is not a copy of Dr. Cristina Yang, but shares some things in common with her. Eve is ambitious, obsessive, and wretched at maintaining a healthy personal life.
She can’t hold her tongue, is disorganised at times, and has a brain that won’t shut off. The part demands an actor with sarcasm and the capacity to shift from aggressive to vulnerable and back again within a matter of seconds. Oh is perfect for the role.
In Villanelle, Comer gets the most intriguing character, and the British actress is exceptional in the role. Villanelle is brilliant, fearless, funny, and indubitably a psychopath. The seriest also has a strong supporting cast. Shaw, as Eve’s superior, is a brainy, strong-willed spy, and David Haig, as Eve’s work husband and occasional doubting Thomas, plays a charming klutz caught in Eve and Villanelle’s crossfire.
Contract killers, as Eve observes, are almost always men, and this is true on TV too. Just by being a woman, Villanelle is a strange and new character. She is a beautiful woman and her beauty has its advantages: her marks are almost universally unsuspicious of her. She weaponises her femininity not through sex but through stereotypes.
It’s a fact that having women in the lead roles freshens up the genre’s conventions. The series has a mission: to take a genre usually steeped in the masculine and feminise it.
> Mar Martínez