Summary
There is no show airing right now more unsettling than Cape Fear, often for reasons that are subtle and difficult to articulate. Javier Bardem once again steals the show in “Pierced”.
It’s very hard to articulate precisely what it is about Cape Fear that’s so unsettling. There isn’t a great deal that actually happens in Episode 4, and what does largely occurs off-screen, but “Pierced” nonetheless has a peculiarly awful vibe to it that is really difficult to escape from. You can see it in the little nuances of the performances, especially Javier Bardem’s. But you can see it in other ways, too; the canted camera angles, the extended shots without a cut, the color-negatives, and crisp editing that uses the power of inference and implication — you may never skewer a strawberry again without wincing — to do most of the heavy lifting.
Not to gush, obviously. There’s a case to be made that Cape Fear is moving a bit too slowly after it got off to such a quick start, and the line it’s walking between reality and imagination, grounded drama and light supernaturalism, can feel a bit like it’s trying to have its cake and eat it. But it’s undeniably extremely compelling, and Bardem, who is already best known for playing absolute lunatics, is doing perhaps the finest work of his career here, which is really saying something.
That weakness we saw in Max at the tail end of the previous episode is gone now, though his stalker — played in a casting coup by Juliette Lewis — isn’t. When “Pierced” opens, Max is indulging in some kind of ritual involving Spanish prayers, a crude bust with seashell eyes, and a sketch of what he later explains to Tom in a members’ club is of his unborn son, Adam, rendered by Zack and gifted to Max in the clandestine exchange observed on the home security system. Max is so compelling when he’s talking about having missed the opportunity to get to know his son, and what he might give for even a moment’s opportunity to do so, that you might forget he may be trying to bring him back from the dead by dark magic. You can never quite tell.
Max gets a ton to do this week, since he continues to involve himself heavily in the SJLP, which has hit a pretty significant snag since Ruben Ramirez has had his appeal denied. As far as I can tell, Ruben is legitimately innocent, and there’s a witness named Warren Pitt, aka Smiley, who can prove it. But he’d risk an accessory charge by doing so, which makes him reluctant. Anna initially tries to compel the snake-owning Smiley to help out through sheer charm alone, but when he pulls a gun on her and throws her phone in one of the snake tanks, it becomes pretty obvious that her accent isn’t going to cut it.
Enter Max. But even then, his public campaigns on Ruben’s behalf are having the opposite effect, diverting most of the attention back to himself — helped along by his seemingly all-female fan club, the CadyHawks — and away from the issue at hand. When Max volunteers some more personal services for getting Smiley to talk, it makes him clash a little with Ray, but Anna eventually comes around to the idea. She’s a pragmatist, so she can overlook the really obvious danger that Max represents. Here, he gets into it with a used car salesman named David, whose wife, Sandy, Max seems to have slept with back in the day, and then forcibly kisses Anna when she asks for his assistance. It probably wasn’t just me who noticed that she took quite a while to push him away, but we’ll chalk it up to shock.
That theme of complicity is threaded throughout Cape Fear Episode 4, though. Max pretends that he can relate to Smiley on the level of spiritual brotherhood, but as soon as the conversation gets a bit testy, Anna knows it’s time to take herself outside. We see Max stab one of Smiley’s snakes in the head and send a fork dangerously close to one of his eyes, but we don’t see whatever happens next. However, the fact that Max emerges with a taped statement exonerating Ruben suggests that it probably wasn’t a kiss and a cuddle. Though, knowing Max, I suppose it might have been.
Lily Collias and Malia Pyles in Cape Fear | Image via Apple TV
While Anna is pretending this isn’t happening, she’s confronted by Juliette Lewis, who she almost knocked down early in the episode when she found her lurking outside her home. Juliette — her character still hasn’t been named yet — warns her to stay away from Max, and mentions that she also cautioned Amy and Melissa to do the same. She’s also filming the exchange, and implies she might have caught the earlier kiss on camera also, but Anna either doesn’t think about this or doesn’t care much either way. As for Ruben, he’s going to be freed after the right paperwork is filed, so this probably constitutes a good day at the office.
There’s bad news coming, though. Ray calls to tell Anna that he looked into Nevaeh, as she asked, and turned up the disturbing news that her mother was a former prison nurse who was fired for having an intimate relationship with a prisoner — Max Cady. Ray believes that Nevaeh is Max’s daughter, which doesn’t bode well for the Bowden family.
Nevaeh is in this episode, for what it’s worth, mostly cosying up to Natalie by basically forcing her to have her nipples pierced and then breaking into Callie’s house so they can have sex on her bed. Nevaeh’s influence is rubbing off on Natalie, causing her to be extremely hostile with her parents and ditch soccer practice without a second thought, but it’s perhaps Zack we should be more concerned about. Either way, we simply cannot trust someone who carries a Wi-Fi jammer around.
But yeah, Zack. He’s still undergoing therapy for the whole revenge porn scandal, but Tom is getting understandably frustrated with the lack of progress being made. Zack is hyperfixating on apologising to his ex-girlfriend, Sophia, and also seems interested in discussing Tom’s brother, who apparently died in a car accident. Through Tom’s flashbacks, we can see that he committed suicide and young Tom found the body, but Tom keeps this to himself and panic-fires the therapist. There’s little wonder these kids are maladjusted.
Zack makes an idiot of Tom by asking him to take him to a student art show which is really a pretense for trying to publicly apologise to Sophia, which backfires tremendously. She later unblocks Zack just to tell him that she’ll never forgive him, which causes him to break down and message AngelX — aka Nevaeh — for support. She meets with him right as Anna is uncovering her potential connection to Max, which can’t bode well. Then again, nothing in this show bodes well for anyone. We might as well get used to it.
