It’s almost impossible to resist bingeing the entirety of this classy detective drama set around a posh wedding in Nantucket. It’s a glorious, perfectly paced delight.
It’s gorgeous to look at, it stars a 4,000-bedroom mansion on a beautiful stretch of US coastline and it’s packed with lavish lifestyles funded by fifth-generational wealth. There are cashmere knits in impractical colours, plus more beautiful coastline, a murder that almost everyone in the vicinity had a motive to carry out – and did I mention the beautiful coastline?
We can only be in the presence of Nicole Kidman’s latest vehicle. This time, it’s called The Perfect Couple, but you can think of it as Big Little Lies relocated from Monterey, California, to Nantucket, Massachusetts. Or as The Undoing with plot. Or as Nine Perfect Strangers, but not bonkers. It is also, as any luxe murder-mystery is these days, part The White Lotus – which Kidman wasn’t in, but who can quite remember?
So, what are the tweaks to the spec? The perfect couple of the title are a bestselling romantic novelist named, for some reason – perhaps abusive parents, perhaps a case of Bertie Wooster’s “raw work pulled at the font” – Greer Garrison Winbury (Kidman) and Tag (Liev Schreiber), her husband of 29 years. It is possible that they are not as perfect as they seem. They have three sons – Thomas (Jack Reynor), a piece of work, golden boy Benji (Billy Howle) and youngster Will (Sam Nivola) who hadn’t come into play in the episodes available to reviewers, but rare indeed is the character in these chess-like productions that goes unused so we’ll watch and wait for his move.
Benji is getting married to Amelia (Eve Hewson), whom he loves madly, even though she was brought up without sight of the sea and with no cashmere knits. Greer is icily furious about this and is taking it out on everybody in the most Waspy way possible – by creating the perfect wedding for the pair, admiring the fruit basket Amelia’s parents bring as a gift and savaging the bride behind her back at every opportunity.
Almost as adept at slicing and dicing those who aren’t born to the purple is Thomas’s pregnant wife, Abby (Dakota Fanning, having a wonderful time as a weakness-seeking missile) and the wedding planner, Roger (Tim Bagley), deeply in thrall to the glamour of his betters. “They’re ‘I’m bored – let’s go buy a monkey’ rich!” he says with glee. “‘Kill someone and get away with it’ rich.”
Subtle foreshadowing has its place, but not here. There is also the Winbury’s faithful housekeeper (Gosia, played by Irina Dubova), who is contemptuous of anyone who has not been born into or worked for the family for at least two generations, and a particular admirer of Greer’s tight rein over all. “Without fear, there can be no control.” Their interviews with the police intersect the action and shed sidelights on the main characters, just as those of potential witnesses and suspects did in Big Little Lies. It’s equally effective.
Added to this little lot is the hard-partying maid of honour Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy) – more “raw work” – an $18,000 bracelet bought by Tag, but not given to his wife, and lustful looks cast by Amelia at the best man, Shooter (Ishaan Khattar). There are many ignored calls to Greer from someone called Broderick Graham, pills and pot free to all and a bloodstained shirt hidden under the bed of the police chief’s daughter. Throw in Isabelle Adjani as a longtime family friend (and semtex in human form) and the stage is set for us to have a ludicrously good time in the very doggest days of summer.
Once the police investigation starts, it becomes clear who the star of the show is – neither Kidman nor the mansion, nor even the knits, but Donna Lynne Champlin as Det Nikki Henry. What a performance. Every thought the detective is having about these awful people plays fleetingly across her face, although never for long enough to jeopardise the case, however much she hauls the local police chief, Dan (Michael Beach), over the coals for cosying up to the family that funds so much activity in the community.
The Perfect Couple has a proper plot – and some to spare. The carousel of suspects turns and reveals drop at perfectly spaced intervals; if there is anyone who can resist bingeing all six episodes once they have started, I will eat a fruit basket. It may or may not have things to say about the haves and have-nots, the power of money to corrupt, as well as class consciousness, but it doesn’t have anything like the interest The White Lotus, say, took in such questions. It was adapted by Jenna Lamia from the book of the same name by Elin Hilderbrand, who is known as the queen of the beach read. Lamia has kept exactly what makes such books great and presented us with a glorious, ridiculous treat. Nothing to do but sit back and enjoy.
The Perfect Couple is on Netflix
The series delights in both concealing and revealing its secrets. Every guest at the wedding seems to be doing something inappropriate, to the point that Greer now regularly asks her friends and family to sign non-disclosure agreements. Amelia doesn’t love this particular side of her mother-in-law, as Greer is an uptight, proudly upper-class matriarch who doesn’t approve of her son’s choice of partner and never misses a chance to make that clear.
At times, Greer’s passive aggression is like a magic trick, with Kidman managing to transform lines like “Don’t you keep a carafe by your bedside?” into the most withering of insults. Benji, though, assures Amelia that sly insults and NDAs are just how his family operates, and she agrees to go along with it—until one of their wedding guests washes up dead on the shore.
The remote location means that the killer is almost certainly one of the other guests, and the stage is set for a locked-room mystery. Beginning with the investigation into the murder, police interviews provide a quick way for us to get familiar with the rest of the family: Benji’s two brothers, Thomas (Jack Reynor) and Will (Sam Nivola); his heavily pregnant sister-in-law, Abby (Dakota Fanning); and a mysterious family friend named Shooter (Ishaan Khattar).
They make for compelling suspects, some seeming so overtly awful that you instantly rule them out for being too obvious. For one, Reynor taps back into the same dark wells of alpha-male behavior that he did for Ari Aster’s Midsommar, playing Thomas as another guy you just want to shove inside a bear and set on fire. Then, by the next episode, you find yourself wondering if this might be a double-bluff. Perhaps the most obvious explanation really is the correct one.
Other characters reveal fascinating new layers as the investigation proceeds. Where Amelia and Benji’s relationship can seem a little limp, especially given that it’s the main thread that theoretically holds The Perfect Couple’s plot together, Greer and her husband, Tag (Liev Schreiber), make for an endlessly fascinating pairing. His gruff warmth is the only force on Earth that can melt her icy exterior, but the true nature of their relationship turns out to be much messier than the image they’ve concocted to help Greer sell books. In a game of “Fuck, Marry, Kill,” it’s likely that both Greer and Tag would name the other for all three categories.
Meanwhile, Nikki Henry (Donna Lynne Champlin) is a hardnosed detective with a sardonic sense of humor that cuts straight through all the airs and graces put on by the Windbury clan. She remains rigidly professional in all of her dealings with them, but her eyes always betray a sense of total contempt for these overprivileged oafs and the sycophants that surround them.
This sort of upstairs-downstairs dynamic is often central to the murder-mystery genre, and while class differences are theoretically a major part of The Perfect Couple, its investigation of them doesn’t reveal much beyond the fact that wealthy people are often assholes. But even if the upper-crust world that the series conjures doesn’t provide much in terms of meaningful insight, it still makes for a richly detailed place to take in a sultry murder mystery.
