Summary
Cape Fear starts to move a little more slowly in “Phantom Sensations”, but the tension is building steadily and effectively as Max Cady ingratiates himself deeper and deeper into Anna and Tom’s lives.
Not a great deal happens in Episode 3 of Cape Fear. This is by design. Season 1 began with a fairly intense double-bill that introduced Max Cady and the general sense of danger he presented to the Bowden family, and then luxuriated in the implication of that as the mystery developed. “Phantom Sensations” continues luxuriating, but doesn’t introduce much more to chew on, and lacks a standout suspense sequence or defining twist. It’s not a bad episode, by any means, and Javier Bardem continues to be a riveting presence in easily his best villain turn since Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men, but it’s very much the kind of hour designed to set up the really dramatic stuff that’s inevitably coming.
But it’ll take a while to get there. We have build-up to do in the meantime, and that means developing multiple plot threads at once, making little hints with wider implications, but not quite committing to any major developments just yet. Take Tom, as an example. In a general sense, he doesn’t get a great deal to do. He has to deal with a couple of random junkies who turn up to use his pool, having supposedly been invited by the homeowner, and then he spends some time with Lexi, a woman he has clearly been on the cusp of an affair with, and commits to a minor kiss with until Anna returns home.
But the devil is in the details. If you’re paying attention, there’s definitely some foreshadowing in Tom’s substantial gun collection, his immediate deployment of Stand Your Ground laws, and his angry post-threat workout. There’s a clear implication he’s capable of violence. And he’s probably going to need to be, since someone keeps leaving dog dirt on his property, hacking into his security system, and flying a drone over the yard.
That drone just so happens to capture footage of Natalie working out, and that footage quickly gets disseminated from her own mobile number to her entire social circle. With her obvious feelings for her pal Callie going unrequited, this is a level of embarrassment she could do without, and her only confidante, who introduces herself as Amber and gets her high, clearly doesn’t have her best interests at heart.
We know not to trust “Amber”, since her real name is Nevaeh, and she’s the illusive AngelX, which Anna discovers by getting her firm’s PI, Ray, to clone Zack’s phone so that she can monitor his communications. While he’s sleeping, she baits AngelX into sharing a photo that leads her directly to Nevaeh, so it’s hardly a sophisticated catfishing operation. For now, it isn’t clear how Nevaeh is connected to Max Cady, if she is at all, but the implication is very much that she is. Anna frightens her into “dumping” Zack by threatening to have her arrested and charged for dealing drugs to a minor, but the fact that she immediately targets Natalie afterwards proves she’s more terrified of someone else than of losing her freedom. And that sounds like Max.
Speaking of Max, the bulk of Cape Fear Episode 3 finds him and Anna travelling to Atlanta to seek reparations for him having been brained by a white supremacist gang while wrongly institutionalised. It’s good PR for the SJLP, and naturally Cady has insisted that Anna does the deal, mostly just to force her into an uncomfortably close road trip with him. When she enters her own kitchen, she finds him making sandwiches for the journey, which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so terrifying. Either way, though, Anna has no choice but to tag along, and either out of a sense of personal responsibility or the fact that she just can’t help herself, she immediately shifts into legal shark mode to ensure Max gets the most money possible.
There’s other stuff going on here, though. A car is following them that is later revealed to contain a woman with a personal connection to Max; she knocks on Anna’s hotel room during the night and asks to sing him a song, but she scurries off when she realises she has the wrong room. Max downplays it as one of his many lunatic female fans, but there’s more to it, since when he gets home, there’s a package waiting for him from the same woman, containing a recording of her singing that song, which drives him into a violent frenzy. Notably, she’s played by Juliette Lewis, who played Danielle Bowden in the Martin Scorsese version. “Phantom Sensations” ends with him brutalising his TV with a fireplace poker.
Max also implies to Anna that there was a specific moment during his trial when her relationship with him changed, implying he knows something more than he’s letting on about the nature of the case, something that was also implied in the previous episode when Tom asked Anna if Max might know “what they did”. It’s all speculation at the moment, since there’s still so much we don’t know, but even though there’s very much an implication that Max might have been innocent all along, Bardem is going so broad with the performance that there’s basically no doubt he’s a violent lunatic. Either way, I’m looking forward — though perhaps, given what we’ve seen thus far, that’s not entirely the right term — to finding out more.
