Summary
With its stellar performances, disorienting editing and framing, and dense, interlocking mysteries, there’s already a case to be made that Apple TV’s take on Cape Fear is the best version of the story.
It’s difficult to build sympathy for a man who kills people with gym equipment, but then again, I’m not sure that Cape Fear is trying to build sympathy around Max Cady. It is, however, trying to build something, some kind of feeling for him that extends beyond simple, garden-variety terror. It’s a feeling filtered through two prior adaptations of the same material, two previous takes on the same character, and a medley of storytelling and stylistic devices that draw explicit parallels between past and present, real and imagined, and, yes, sympathy and disgust. When Episode 2, “Why Would I Want To Hurt You?”, opens with a seven-years-earlier flashback to how Cady sustained the head injury he described to Anna and Tom in the premiere, it’s all of these things at once.
Cady was attacked in the prison gym by three skinheads; he was defending himself. But he was defending himself with a level of violence that most, even the very desperate, wouldn’t be capable of. It’s reiterating the danger he presents, but also the level of threat he feels he’s under, which is why the present-day sequence of the cops bursting into his Airbnb while he’s asleep in the tiny closet is mirrored very explicitly with his prison assault. This is a man who is always coiled and ready to attack, like a wounded animal. But it’s also a man capable of rather extreme violence, almost immune to pain and injury, and deeply incensed by what he perceives to be a miscarriage of justice predicated on corruption and collusion. And he might be right.
Anna doesn’t know – and, in truth, the audience doesn’t either – whether Cady cut off Zach’s toe, but it’s easy to imagine that he did. When Anna bumps into Cady in the hospital, where he’s having his finger reset after his arrest, he reiterates that he has no reason to hurt her; that, on the contrary, they have more in common than anyone realises. But nobody, least of all Anna, is buying that. Not that Zach himself is an especially sympathetic figure, with his social issues stemming from a revenge porn scandal in which he leaked lewd photos of his girlfriend in a boys-only group chat. When he vomited up his own toe, which he had evidently been made to swallow by whoever cut it off, I can’t say I was especially worried about his wellbeing. He seems awful.
The toe thing is a big deal though, especially since Natalie discovers evidence that the amputation took place in the house, in a kind of ritualistic fashion. And the paranoia it creates bleeds into everything, with even the arrival of Natalie’s friend Callie, who she clearly has the hots for, being framed as a jump-scare. Zach’s… let’s say questionable past also makes him susceptible to Cady’s manipulations, so when the two bump into each other in the hospital bathroom, something feels deeply amiss, even though nothing explicitly weird is happening. The editing and framing do so much heavy lifting in this show that you can never quite tell what’s being implied at any given moment – you just know that something definitely is.
Needless to say, when Byron and his mother, Bunny, are both found dead, Cady is the prime suspect for the audience, even though Noa is buying the official line that Bunny killed Byron and then died from a stress-induced heart attack. It doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but Noa, like Anna prior to this, is only concerned about the public-facing side of the SJLP, so any potential scandal has to be neatly sidestepped. In Byron’s absence, their only possible remaining poster boy is a man named Ruben, a Death Row inmate who just so happens to have decided against working with the SJLP. It’s Anna’s job to get him back on-side, but for once, she decides to put Zach first, giving Cady an opportunity to step in.
Javier Bardem and Amy Adams in Cape Fear | Image via Apple TV
I mentioned that Anna is putting Zach first there, but that isn’t entirely accurate. That’s her excuse to Noa, but she spends most of the time at home trying to work out the identity of Zach’s internet girlfriend, AngelX, by force if necessary. Ostensibly, this is for Zach’s own good. But you can tell it’s more for Anna’s peace of mind, a way to establish further connections to Cady, to prove herself right. In a roundabout way, it’s telling that it’s Natalie who consoles Zach when he tries to sneak out and apologise to Sophia, his wronged ex-girlfriend, and not his parents, who are too busy forgetting he exists and debating whether Max Cady was ever guilty in the first place. And that’s a problem either way, since if he was, he’s still dangerous now, and they’re under serious threat, and if he wasn’t, they put an innocent man in prison.
Cape Fear Episode 2 spends a lot more time with Cady, and again, the parallels between him and Zach are deliberate. He, too, has visions; Zach sees a guy claiming to be Cady’s surviving son, while Cady sees his dead wife. He also sees a woman in a green jacket who bumped into Anna at the hospital. Sometimes, his vision blurs around the edges and glitches, the way the digital photo frames in the Bowden house do, implying they’ve been hacked. His present-day experiences blur with his time in prison. It’s all a mess, but he clearly has an objective he’s pursuing. That objective seems to require a dog, which he finesses from a useless owner in the neighbourhood, and also involves Ruben, who Cady goes to see in prison to change his mind about the SJLP.
Convincing Ruben – this is what I meant when I said Anna’s focus on Zach gives Cady an opportunity – allows Cady to begin formally working with the SJLP, doing interviews with The Times to give us a better sense of his traumatic backstory. His father was an American serviceman stationed in the south of Spain, who impregnated a local Basque woman who didn’t want children. She neglected Cady until she took her own life when he was 13, at which point he was shipped over to America to be raised by a father who also didn’t want him, and who, according to some scattered flashbacks, kept him in a cage and forcibly baptised him, presumably among other unpleasant things. Cady claims to just want to get his life back on track and help people who have had similar experiences, and if you squint a little, you can see why someone would believe him.
Anna doesn’t, though, and justifiably, since Cady is careful to say something in his interview that is a direct quote of something that “AngelX” said to Zach, implying that it was him catfishing Zach, the same way that his fingers and toes comment implied it was he who amputated his toe. He’s being subtle enough that people believe his story, while also being explicit enough that Anna feels permanently imperilled. And it seems like she has a reason to, since she and Tom have a conversation about whether Cady could know “what they did”, which is problematically overheard by Natalie. We don’t know what they might have done at this point, but it’s easy enough to guess. Either way, they’re probably going to be made to pay for it.
