Summary
Instantly arresting and nuanced, Apple TV’s Cape Fear is an already excellent production buoyed by yet another scintillating Javier Bardem villain turn.
There are many first impressions made by Apple TV’s take on Cape Fear, the third adaptation of John D MacDonald’s 1957 psychological thriller The Executioners. It’s weird and arresting and frightening and disconcerting. But, at least in Episode 1, the primary takeaway is that Javier Bardem is really good at this whole villain thing. He’s playing Max Cady, who was played by Robert De Niro in the 1991 Martin Scorsese version, but he’s playing him like his life depends on it. He doesn’t show up until halfway through “Fingers & Toes”, but he immediately seizes the show by the throat and refuses to let it go.
Even before he’s on-screen, Cady’s presence can be felt. One of the earliest scenes in this premiere finds a woman surrounded by newspaper clippings recounting Cady’s arrest and hefty sentencing for killing his pregnant wife, putting a gun in her mouth and pulling the trigger, then waking up with half of her face hanging off and doing it again, this time fatally. The second time, she’s coached by a voice that is a little unclear but sounds a lot like Bardem’s. Immediately, Cady’s name carries a kind of mythic quality, and he’s consistently framed in this oddly otherworldly way.
We later learn that this woman was Cady’s mistress, and that, in her suicide note, she confessed to having committed the crime that Cady was banged up for. The note was embellished with details only the real killer would know, and for good measure, she was also in possession of the murder weapon, which was never found at the time. To the audience, it’s obvious that Cady has finessed this situation to get himself exonerated, but the public doesn’t know that. Neither do the lawyers who were intimately involved in his case, both of whom he begins to target and creepily harass the second he’s released.
Naturally, then, a lot of this premiere is about introductions. Anna is a workaholic high-power defense attorney and minor celebrity on account of fronting an innocence project of which Byron French, an innocent man who has just been released from prison, is the poster boy. Anna is the kind of careerist who spends her Fourth of July patting her kids on the head while she has a serious meeting via AirPods. Anna’s project is on a fundraising drive, so she’s doing interviews and planning galas and parading Byron around almost against his will, like a hostage.
Anna is married to Tom, another lawyer, though this is where it gets interesting. Tom was the prosecutor in Cady’s case. Anna was his defense attorney. You can see how the waters might have become a little muddied there. Anna was pregnant during the trial with her first child, Natalie, and she supposedly fell for Tom later. But there are rumours swirling that they were intimate during the trial, which doesn’t bode well for the fact that Anna pushed Cady to plead guilty to a crime that, apparently, he didn’t commit. You can kind of see why he’s annoyed.
Anna and Tom have a younger son, Zach, who spends all of his time clearly being catfished in a ropey-looking online game. He seems to have some mental health issues that cause him to lash out, often at himself, and he’s openly dismissive of his parents’ profession in a kind of preening nu-liberal way. He also seems to walk headlong into danger at all times, which will become important later.
This is because the turning point of Cape Fear Episode 1 isn’t Cady’s release, since that happens mostly off-screen, but him arriving at Anna’s fundraiser, hijacking the mic, and giving a demented speech about how a life sentence is like death by a thousand cuts, losing fingers and toes until all you have is gone. He’s also careful to point out how the relationship between Anna and Tom clearly prejudiced his case. He isn’t a sympathetic figure, but he is a charismatic one, and you can see why people might listen to him. Naturally, they do, and pretty soon Anna and Tom are the news for all the wrong reasons. Scandal surrounds them pretty much instantly.
Cady’s arrival also casts various odd events around the Bowden household, including Natalie fishing a family of dead skunks — parents and two children, uh-oh — from the family swimming pool, in a much more sinister context. Cady pretends to Anna that he’d like to be a useful face to her innocent project, but it’s obvious he has ulterior, sinister motives. When he turns up at the family home in the middle of the night on the pretense of returning a clutch bag, it just so happens to coincide with Zach’s return. While Tom is occupied with his seemingly high son, Cady corners Anna outside and says, “I never said a word about what happened. Why would I start now?” But what happened?
Well, there’s no time to ponder, since blood is leaking through Zach’s shoe, and when it and his sock are removed, it transpires that one of his toes has been amputated. What was Cady saying about fingers and toes, again? Until all you have is gone? Doesn’t exactly bode well for the Bowden family. But I think the audience probably has a lot to look forward to.
