Summary
Just One Look follows the typical Harlan Coben template to the letter, delivering a taut and surprising mystery with no delusions of grandeur.
We have long since reached a point where “It’s a Harlan Coben thriller” will pretty much suffice as a description of a TV show. But it’s important to remember that the famed author’s extensive Netflix deal isn’t just for big English-language stuff that kicks off the new year, like Missing You and Fool Me Once. Just One Look is the third Polish series to be based on Coben’s novels, this time the same-titled thriller about a seemingly ordinary woman whose life is turned upside-down after discovering a photo of her husband from before she knew him.
All the hallmarks are there. A “normal” life suddenly upended, multiple interlinked mysteries, and a gradual series of discoveries that lead to increasingly overwrought twists and turns. The reason Coben’s work is so eminently adaptable is that almost all of it operates on the same fundamental suspense principles – here are a bunch of questions you don’t know the answers to, and here’s a steady drip-feed of clues to help you put the pieces together.
The basis of Just One Look is very much this. Greta (Maria Debska) is happily married and has mostly put the trauma of a long-ago tragedy behind her when, through a series of convoluted circumstances, she comes across a photograph of her husband many years in the past. Confused by his unfamiliar visage and companions, she questions him about it, and he promptly leaves the house and disappears.
While what happened to Jacek isn’t kept a mystery for long, the reasons behind it unfold steadily across six 40-ish-minute episodes, leading Greta into the depths of an increasingly dense mystery that stretches back years and involves the murdered daughter of prosecutor Borys Gajewicz, with whom Greta forms a sort of unofficial partnership. Needless to say, the event in her past – a fire at a concert which she survived but several others did not – is connected, but to say any more would, of course, be telling.
And spoilers are more important than ever in shows like Just One Look because they’re built on a series of nested twists and revelations. They’re not high art or vibey mood pieces. They’re workmanlike entertainment designed to tickle that very lizard-like part of the viewer’s brain that keeps them pressing “play next episode” despite it being 2 am.
Every aspect of the show, adapted by Maciej Kowalewski and Agata Malasi?ska and directed by Marek Lechki and Monika Filipowicz (Signs), is designed to exploit this fundamental impulse; the need to find out what is being concealed. But a bit like Fool Me Once, Just One Look is heavily dependent on its lead to situate the audience in the right headspace and lead them through each unexpected development. Maria Debska is an interesting screen presence in that regard. Seemingly ageless, she looks the same in the present-day sequences as she does in a handful of flashbacks, nowhere near old enough to be a mother to her two cute children but somehow surprisingly worldly in her performance. It’s very good casting, and a game supporting cast including Miros?aw Zbrojewicz, Miros?aw Haniszewski, Marta Malikowska, Cezary ?ukasiewicz, and Piotr Stramowski rounds things out.
There’s nothing new or remarkable here, let me be clear. But in the age of taut binge-ready entertainment where stories are designed to be gobbled up in one sitting, feverishly discussed on social media, and then promptly forgotten about, Just One Look feels engineered with a watchmaker’s precision to do precisely what it needs to and nothing more. That kind of fat-free filmmaking will always prove popular, and usually for good reason. Just one look is all it needs.
RELATED:
