THE UNDOING: Formulaic Yet a Guilty Pleasure

The Undoing was for many an eagerly awaited classic whodunit, backed by an excellent team. Although the producer of the series is David E. Kelley and its main star is Nicole Kidman, The Undoing is unfortunately far from Big Little Lies, with which it is often compared. It is a predictable series tailored from pure clichés.

The protagonists of the series, Grace (Nicole Kidman) and Jonathan (Hugh Grant) Fraser, are a wealthy New York couple through and through.

She is a respected therapist, he a renowned pediatric oncologist. Their exclusive apartment is perfectly furnished and situated in a prestigious neighborhood, and their son Henry (Noah Jupe) plays the violin and attends an elite school for children from rich families. The Frasers’ life is seemingly perfect, revolving around similarly wealthy people.

They live in a privileged bubble, where the biggest nuisance is the obligation to attend lavish charity events. This idyll is disrupted by the appearance of Elena Alves (Matilda de Angelis) in their lives.

The Latina shows up at a school mothers’ meeting, meant to discuss a charity event, and is the total opposite of the wealthy, respectable white New Yorkers – she has exotic beauty, an eccentric personality, and works as an artist, rather less wealthy. Her son attends the same school as Henry, Grace and Jonathan’s son, only thanks to a scholarship. When Elena is murdered, secrets begin to surface that turn Grace’s life upside down.

Nicole Kidman is enjoyable to watch, after all she is a very good actress, although the role of Grace Fraser is far too similar to the role of Celeste in Big Little Lies (a seemingly perfect husband, marital problems, sacrificing for the family, material status, being part of the school clique of perfect mothers), and in many moments the actress plays in similar registers.

Similarly, the role of Donald Sutherland, who plays Franklin Reinhardt, Grace’s wealthy father, comes across as almost a copy of J.

Paul Getty from the series Trust. The potential of Lily Rabe (American Horror Story) was completely wasted – in the initial episodes she comes to the forefront, giving the impression she will be a key character, yet from a certain point the creators completely forget about her.

Teenage Noah Jupe (A Quiet Place, Honey Boy) does a great job, with many predicting him a successful acting career. The real paradox, however, is Hugh Grant. On the one hand, this is his most interesting role in years, perhaps even in his entire career, on the other – although it carries the gravity and drama proper to a family thriller, at times it borders on ridiculous.

Grant somewhat plays a parody of himself – a respectable, amiable Brit.

The Undoing is above all a collection of worn-out motifs present in any run-of-the-mill thriller or crime story, of which there are plenty on bookstore shelves nowadays (I mention this not without reason, since The Undoing is a series based on the crime novel You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz).

Predictable, sensational tabloid-like plot twists and unsophisticated, formulaic characters make The Undoing offer little besides banal entertainment in guilty pleasure style. As befits a crime series, each episode ends with a cliffhanger, so inevitably one watches out of a simple desire to find out what happens next. All this, however, is the fault of a poor script, from which even a director of Susanne Bier’s caliber was not able to extract much.