Summary
In The Little Drummer Girl Episode 4, Park Chan-wook’s stylish adaptation of John le Carré’s novel ups the stakes and kicks the drama into a higher gear.
Knocking around in Somerset eating crisps, Charlie (Florence Pugh) is waiting for a gang of Palestinian terrorists to make contact with her, which I suppose can’t be easy. And then there’s the pesky fact that she’s now complicit in a double-murder, which is what tips her over the edge in The Little Drummer Girl Episode 4. The human cost of this whole endeavour, not to mention getting held at gunpoint and interrogated, is a bit much to deal with, really.
Kurtz (Michael Shannon), who put together this whole complex, performative plan, implores Gadi (Alexander Skarsgård) to get her back on-side, which he accomplishes by deploying the power of the p***s. As always with this show, it’s never quite clear whether what we’re seeing is genuine; early in the episode Gadi taught Charlie to fire a gun one-handed and then went on a bizarre rant about Israel and made her kiss the firearm, and he’s clearly not above withholding important pieces of information so that when she finds things out for herself her reaction will be appropriately horrified.
Park Chan-wook shot the no-pants-dance is the most understated way possible, which helps with not knowing what’s what, and the lamp-lit scene in which she examined his various scars under the covers was quite charming, really. And it’s just as well that Charlie fell for it, real or not, because that meant we got the finest scene of the season so far, in which the Palestinians finally caught up with her. Pugh was masterful in The Little Drummer Girl Episode 4, which really gave her something to chew on, I suppose in more ways than one.
I won’t apologise for that joke.
