Summary
Malice shouldn’t work in a lot of respects, but Jack Whitehall’s first proper dramatic turn proves to be surprisingly compelling.
Nothing about Prime Video’s Malice should work. It’s very silly, totally implausible, and stars Jack Whitehall, of all people, not as bumbling comic relief but as the villain. And yet somehow, as implausible as it might be, it all comes together rather nicely across six taut episodes that have Whitehall menacing David Duchovny (Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, Saint X, You People) and his family without feeling remotely out of place. I’m as surprised as you are.
Whitehall’s playing Adam, the charming and handsome tutor to the children of upper-middle-class wannabes Jules (Christine Adams, Hijack) and Damien (Raza Jaffrey, The Serpent Queen). But Adam has a plan, and his current employers are simply a means to an end. When he accompanies them to the swanky Greek island estate of multimillionaire venture capitalist Jamie Tanner (Duchovny), with whose family Jules and Damien annually holiday, it becomes clear that Tanner is his real target. But the target of what? And for what reason? These are questions that Malice keeps deliberately close to its chest for the vast majority of its runtime, which turns out to be a wise way of keeping the audience invested.
Tanner’s wife, Nat (Carice van Houten, Race; Domino; Game of Thrones), and their children Kit (Harry Gilby, The Last Kingdom: Seven Kings Must Die), April (Teddie Allen, the half-sister of Lily and Alfie, late of MobLand), and Dexter (Phoenix Laroche, Trying), take to Adam immediately, albeit for different reasons. He flirts with Nat, shows off an impressive knowledge of Greek myth and Shakespeare, and makes cocktails and fancy meals. It’s enough to get him employed as a live-in “manny” in the Tanners’ London home. What they don’t realise is that Adam means them all – but especially Jamie himself – considerable harm.
The Machiavellian shenanigans start in Greece, with Adam tiptoeing around and poisoning people, tossing passports in the ocean, and doing a very funny thing where he mutters something heinous loudly enough that whoever he’s talking to hears him but quietly enough that they convince themselves they must have misheard. Things only get worse when the action shifts back to Blighty, and because the show is tight-lipped about who Adam really is, what he wants, and how far he’s willing to go to get it, it’s consistently able to feel surprising in the moment despite how unsubtle so much of it is in its broad strokes.
And the Tanners aren’t bad. Sure, they’re very rich; Jamie is arrogant and disinterested, the kids are dysfunctional, and Nat seems to be a little checked out. But they’re not cartoonish monsters. They’re generally decent people who just happen to have made a fortune, which has gone to their heads a little. You’ll find yourself liking them and their dynamic, wondering what they might have done and worrying about their safety. Duchovny is especially great in this, tiptoeing the line between being deserving of a lesson but undeserving of this particular one.
But it’s Whitehall who strings it all together. His backstory and motives are teased out incrementally, as are the depths of his depravity, and there’s a surprising amount of satisfaction to be found in watching him try to navigate unforeseen obstacles as they get in the way of his fiendish master plans. He’s surprisingly believable in this mode, even if everyone’s dogged refusal to see how suspicious he is isn’t quite as convincing. But that’s all part of the fun. Sometimes the characterisation errs too far into cliché – he has some sexual peccadilloes, of course, and there’s also a thing with a snake that feels like it’s trying too hard – but for the most part it’s just about right.
There seems to be an infinite amount of mileage in rich people getting tormented for our viewing pleasure, but Malice makes them sympathetic in a surprising way, and it doesn’t fall into the trap of implying that anyone with a certain net worth is deserving of whatever happens to them. Adam isn’t the relatable underdog – he’s a psycho, and that little bit of edge elevates Malice from a preening class-conscious thriller into something more engaging and effective. Who’d have thought it?
