Summary
Cape Fear amps up the weirdness and intensity a great deal in “Faith”, with Max’s machinations becoming more overt and affecting each member of the Bowden family in just about equal measure.
The mystery about Nevaeh potentially being Max Cady’s daughter lasted until the opening scene of Cape Fear Episode 5, where it’s confirmed outright. You’d think that would limit the show’s capacity to surprise, but it doesn’t at all, since the very same scene shocks you in multiple ways. In it, Anna confronts Nevaeh in a cinema, where she’s harassing patrons the same way she bullies her own mother, and Nevaeh is so gross about Zack and Natalie that it’s a bit of an eyebrow-raiser. Then she walks into traffic and gets hit by a car. She’s fine, but it’s such a surprising flurry of turns in such a short span of time that it’s obvious this show has far from tipped its hand just yet.
Anna doesn’t mention the car thing when she reports the incident to the police or tells Tom about it, but unfortunately for her, someone was filming the whole thing, and the footage promptly goes viral. She’s forced to explain herself to everyone, including Zack and Natalie, the latter of whom isn’t thrilled to learn that the only girl she has wanted to date is a) Max Cady’s daughter and b) the girl that her creepy brother has been speaking to online. Somehow, Anna comes out looking worse off than anyone else, especially since Nevaeh immediately goes missing.
Max has a built-in excuse. He claims to Tom — who should really stop drinking in the same spots — that he’s never even met Nevaeh; she’s a stranger with mental issues who might not even be his daughter. He communicated with her when he was in prison, and even then, she seemed to have some serious issues with the Bowden family, but apparently, he talked her out of taking any action, and he has the evidence to prove it. Anna’s claims that it might be fabricated only make her look more unhinged.
And she isn’t the only member of the Bowden family who does. After his recent chat with Sophia, Zack is even crazier than usual, having taken to carrying around some weird seashell-encrusted thing he found by the garage and trying to put the moves on his sister when she shows him a bit of kindness. It’s unclear whether he’s being serious or just trying to bait Natalie, since he also references things that she said to Nevaeh about him in confidence, but either way, this guy can’t even eat fruit without looking like a serial killer while doing it.
Things aren’t going well for Tom, either. One of his clients, Catherine, doesn’t want Lexi to work her case since she thinks — rightly, I imagine — that Tom is distracted by her. But Lexi, rather than taking this graciously, instead not-so-subtly threatens to report Tom to HR for every questionable thing he has ever done, up to and including kissing her. It’s such a suddenly sinister turn that it feels almost random, like the entire family has been cursed by Max’s presence to such an extent that the universe is simply conspiring against them. I can’t tell whether Tom’s decision to have a drink with Max after once again bumping into him at the members’ club validates this theory or disproves it.
And Max has enough to worry about. Juliette Lewis’s character confronts him while he’s having a flirtatious chat with Tabitha, and the look of terror on his face is profound. He drags her away so they can have a private chat, which consists of a bit of kissing, death threats, and Max eventually spitting in her mouth (but in a threatening, non-sexy way). I have no idea what is going on with these two. They’ve obviously had an intimate relationship in the past that predates his time in prison, but we’ve already deduced that she’s connected to his abusive father, so there’s lots more still to uncover.
In the meantime, Tom provides a handy plaything for Max in Cape Fear Episode 5, especially since his personality and problems are so surface-level. Max seems to have figured him out entirely. He knows exactly which levers to pull to get him to open up; asking him about his heroes so he talks about his older brother, Nathan, and about his fears so Max can reveal he has already intuited his innate fear of entropy, of chaos, of disorder. It’s like watching a cat smack a mouse around.
A few drinks turn into a full-on night out, which turns into a seemingly random reunion with the creeps, Ollie and Trish, whom Tom caught dipping their feet in his pool. As the night progresses, Ollie gets jealous of Max’s closeness with Trish, and things turn aggressive. After spotting a CCTV camera, Max positions himself so he’s unseen, starts a fight by headbutting Ollie, and then makes himself scarce while Tom — an ex-Marine, apparently — finishes the job in the bar security system’s ambit. It smells very much like a setup. What are the chances that both Bowdens would otherwise get filmed committing violent incidents on the same day?
They also both get suspended. For Anna, it’s on account of the video with Nevaeh, and with Tom, it’s because, apparently, after the bar, he left Lexi an extremely inappropriate voicemail. It certainly sounds like him, but this isn’t the first time that the Bowdens’ technology has been turned against them in ways that are difficult to explain.
While Tom was letting his hair down, Anna was out looking deeper into Nevaeh, visiting her mother, Faith, when Ray refused to. Initially, she thinks that Faith is scared of Max, but she eventually realises she’s scared of Nevaeh. But she tells a different story about how much contact her daughter had with Max while he was inside. Apparently, she used to video call him, and they’d talk about the religion he made up for himself, and now he has his hooks quite firmly sunk into her. There’s a recurring theme about Max’s almost supernatural charisma that tracks somewhat with the fact that Anna had returned home earlier and found Zach in an almost trance-like state. There’s an eerie power to Max that’s difficult to pin down, and I do wonder how far this adaptation is going to go with it.
Faith directs Anna to Nevaeh’s grim hideout, a warren of bones and maggots and rotting food where she clearly practiced the religion Max taught her. In a little crawlspace, there’s a backpack containing a mailed Polaroid of a lakeside crucifix with the message “One day I will take you here” written on the back. When Anna returns to Faith’s house to show her the picture, she finds her upstairs, having been messily beaten to death by the weird seashell cone thing that Zach was carrying around earlier. She debates calling 911 but decides against it, presumably because the optics aren’t exactly in her favour.
This isn’t even the worst of Anna’s problems. At the end of “Faith”, Max just so happens to be walking his dog past the family home, and Natalie engages him in conversation about Nevaeh. Anna and Tom, now both on the same page about his manipulations, insist that he head home. And he does precisely that — right into the house he has bought directly across the street.
