David E Kelley has been busy the last couple of years with Big Little Lies, Big Sky and now The Undoing starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland.
The Undoing isn’t your usual miniseries. A beautiful young woman has been found murdered, her son attends an exclusive school on the Upper East side of Manhattan where the father of another child is accused of her murder. The accusation ripples across the community causing the stiff upper lip of many of the wealthy parents to gossip as no one knows what to believe, as that type of thing doesn’t happen in their community.
Directed by Susanne Bier, The Undoing is a suspense filled series that twists and turns leaving you with no idea who killed the young artists.
The scenes are filled with images of Manhattan, prior to the pandemic, so Grace Fraser (Nicole Kidman) spends a lot of time walking the city and there are moments that just make you sigh and can’t wait for life to resume as normal.
David E Kelley has developed a story that is equally as disturbing and graphic for the nature of the story that is presented on the screen, but also the reality of human behavior at it’s most guttural and most horrific, what people will do when emotions get involved. This is a very graphic thriller and there are moments where you do cover your eyes and gasp.
The premise of the story is based around an exclusive school where the parent of a child has been found murdered in her artist studio. Jonathan Fraser (Hugh Grant) has been accused of the crime and his loving wife Grace, played by Kidman, sets about to investigate but slowly her world around her unravels.
There are moments in the series where the dialogue and scenes between actors seems a little confusing, slow or lost, but once you understand the whole story, everything falls into place.
Hugh Grant as Jonathan Fraser, is very intense and not a role that you would normally associate with the likes of Grant, given his acting history as a bumbling romantic lead. There is an edginess and something unnerving about his performance that shatters any previous ideas you may have had about him.
Nicole Kidman as Grace Fraser, it is an interesting choice. The character is a leading psychologist and studied at Harvard where she met her doctor husband, she comes from a very wealthy family who live in a giant apartment overlooking Central Park and the place is run by multiple staff. So the character has the makings to be pretentious and unbelievable, but Kidman’s performance comes across as real and genuine, the behavior of a wife who loves her husband but doesn’t understand what is going on as everything is so out of character.
The Undoing is a thinking thriller. You are buzzing the whole time to try and figure out what is going on, who is guilty and also who is lying. There is a suspense that keeps you engaged and preempting everyone’s move, but there is also something about it that makes you realize this type of behavior could be going on right in front of you and you just aren’t aware to it right now.
The Undoing is currently available on HBO Max.
