Summary
Woman in the Shadows is a rigorous thriller than can be a bit too dense and cold for its own good. But the payoff is worth the investment thanks to complex interplay between characters and a refusal to indulge in easy sentimentality.
We’ve all seen our share of spy shows, but Sara – Woman in the Shadows wants to be a bit different. The clunky title should help as far as differentiation is concerned, but if not, the underlying quality will do it. This is six dense episodes of grounded and compelling procedural spycraft enhanced by an unconventional lead and a willingness to meet its underlying themes and ideas halfway. Some might find it cold, especially in the beginning, but that’s sort of the point; in a world of protocol, corruption, and utility, where does something as trite as love even fit?
As soon as you understand this, you can immediately see the logic behind a lot of the Italian drama’s decisions. The plot is kick-started when Sara (Teresa Saponangelo, The Hand of God), a retired intelligence operative, is told rather abruptly that her son has died in clearly mysterious circumstances. But Sara had nothing to do with her son, having given him up very young for a variety of reasons that are unpacked as we go. She’s mourning, but at a remove, which turns the – presumed – murder of her son not into a melodramatic grief exercise but a rigorous intellectual one.
This is how Sara copes, since Sara is – all together now – possessed of a very particular set of skills. Her shady intelligence past has made her a stern and methodical problem-solver, but she’s also gifted with a near-supernatural facility for lip-reading that is brought up constantly as if it’s a superpower. This is the closest Woman in the Shadows comes to outright silliness, but it mostly swerves the accusation by treating even this aspect with abject seriousness, which is probably just as well.
Sara teams up with her old colleague Teresa (Claudia Gerini), whose personal relationship with an ill-advised suitor gets Sara back to work in another – though, of course, parallel – direction, as well as an intemperate policeman named Pardo (Flavio Furno, Four to Dinner, Emily in Paris) and her son’s heavily pregnant partner Viola (Chiara Celotto). Together, this ragtag team investigates what begins as an accident, becomes a murder, and gradually unravels into a wide-ranging political conspiracy for good measure.
Sara – Woman in the Shadows is adapted from the Le indagini di Sara (The Investigations of Sara) series of books by Maurizio de Giovanni, so it’s no surprise that the whole thing has a literary texture to it. But it’s really the overall vibe that’s compelling. Very few stories that are fundamentally about grief are also this proudly unsentimental, so when the emotional components do emerge, they feel a lot more earned than they otherwise would. This is a show that prides itself on complicated interplay between its characters, including Sara and her late son, instead of grasping for the low-hanging fruit of schmaltzy cliches.
The most refreshing idea here is that what doesn’t happen – the conversations that aren’t had, the relationships that don’t take, the fist-pump payoffs that never arrive – is often of more importance than what does. The restraint allows the audience to pick up on inferences and details that reward attention; it’s not a tailor-made binge of the kind that Netflix often indulges in, but more rewarding in the long run. Whether viewers will make it that far – it’s often very dense – is another question, but I have faith that they probably will.
And yet it’s surprisingly risk-averse. Woman in the Shadows operates according to a very familiar playbook and never really seeks to subvert it beyond stripping away a lot of the easy emotional contours. I enjoyed that aspect, granted, but many won’t, and are likely to bounce off the show’s clinical surface. Mileage, as ever, may vary, but fundamentally this is a very competent and efficient series that delivers on its thematic promises, if not always necessarily its dramatic ones.
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