David Duchovny Leads Amazon’s Tepid Thriller

If there’s one thing audiences can’t get enough of, based on the adoration for shows from The White Lotus to Succession to Big Little Lies, it’s watching wealthy white families suffer. We like to ooh and ahh over their luxe lifestyles, to judge them for their callousness, to watch them realize that all the money in the world can’t buy fulfillment, to see if they’ll learn their lesson or get their comeuppance.

If the destabilizing force comes in the form of a mysterious and possibly sinister interloper, all the better. In the past few months alone, shows from All Her Fault to The Girlfriend to Sirens have offered variations on that theme, to varying degrees of excitement.

In that light, the appeal of Prime Video’s latest miserable-rich-people thriller should be obvious. Malice pits a ruthless venture capitalist (David Duchovny, lending the show its only real star power) against a coldhearted snake in the grass (Jack Whitehall’s Adam), with appropriately dark results. But it’s lacking in any actual raison d’être — some deeper theme or surprising subversion or virtuosic artistry that might set it apart from the roughly ten thousand other stories we’ve seen of this ilk already. It’s as hollow as the smiling villain at its center.

What we are left with, in the absence of any compelling point, is a string of events to watch transpire between several people who are neither likable nor particularly interesting. There is some tension in wondering how far any of them might go as things spiral out of control over six hour-long episodes, though not very much, since — as seems to be de rigueur for stories like this one — Malice starts at the end, with Adam being informed by law enforcement that his former employer, Jamie Tanner (Duchovny), has recently run into some serious trouble.

Adam purports to be horrified, but not especially surprised since, he sighs sadly, “Jamie Tanner was not a very nice man.” So while the specific details are left vague (and I’m being vaguer still so as to avoid spoilers), there’s not much mystery as to what happened to Jamie, or who’s behind it. The only real question is why. But even after the show jumps back several months to chronicle the events leading up to that fateful event, it declines to offer anything but the murkiest suggestion of a motive until too late in the game.

Adam first enters the Tanners’ lives via their friends, the Sahanis (Christine Adam and Raza Jaffrey), an upper-middle-class couple who’ve hired him to tutor their daughter and decided they like him enough to bring him along on their summer vacation. From the moment the Sahanis arrive in Greece, however, it’s clear Adam’s real interest lies with the Tanners, the much wealthier family hosting them in their villa.

In a matter of days, Adam ingratiates himself with each member of the Tanner clan. To Nat (Carice van Houten), he’s considerate and empathetic in ways her self-centered husband is not; it doesn’t hurt that he’s also handsome and a bit flirty. To said husband, he’s a drinking buddy and co-conspirator. To their kids, teenagers Kit (Harry Gilby) and April (Teddie Allen) and 9-year-old Dexter (Phoenix Laroche), he’s a teacher, a confidant, a tireless playmate. By the end of the trip, he’s maneuvered himself into a permanent job as their live-in nanny in London, where he can really get cooking on his plan to systematically destroy everything this family holds dear.

Which seems, in theory, like it should be satisfying. Duchovny nails the cruel carelessness of men who are rich enough to have removed nearly all friction from their lives, yet who cannot help feeling aggrieved that they haven’t been able to get rid of all of it. “I suppose I’m the one footing the bill here?” he whines when Dexter’s nanny (Pheonix Jackson Mendoza) falls ill enough that she needs to be helicoptered to the nearest city. He misses no opportunity to passive-aggressively put down his son or “jokingly” put his wife in her place, or to yell at the nearest underpaid employee for failing to deliver the impossible. He is precisely the kind of character you should want to see bad things happen to.

The problem is that in Malice, created by James Wood, those bad things are being done by a man vile enough that he’ll kill a cat without flinching or severely harm an innocent bystander without a second’s thought. It can be fun to root for an immoral character, even an evil one, especially if the characters they’re targeting seem similarly odious. But that requires either understanding what makes the villain tick, or being so entranced by them that we love them in spite of ourselves. Adam accomplishes neither.

We know in very general terms that he’s driven by revenge, because at the end of the first episode he stands over Jamie’s body and says, out loud, to himself, “I could kill you right now if I wanted. But I’m not going to do that. Because I want you to suffer, just like I did.” What exactly he’s avenging, however — and therefore whether his motive might be understandable on any level, or what it might say about his psychology if it’s not — isn’t revealed until near the very end of the season, leaving a big “TBD” where our understanding of the character should be.

Whitehall plays Adam’s superficial, blank charm very well — the slightly too-bright grins he directs at the needy Tanners, the subtle malevolence that tints his perfectly composed face when he thinks no one’s looking. But the script offers too few opportunities to truly see Adam with his mask off, to get to know who he really is beyond an automaton obsessed with retribution. It does offer several opportunities to see him with his shirt off, including in a couple of trips to seedy sex clubs. But the show barely even tries to pretend those visits are anything but red herrings meant to titillate, and then it barely even accomplishes that, since the scenes are brief and relatively tame.

To the end, it remains frustratingly unclear what we’re meant to take away from all of this. That rich people sure can be easily manipulable jerks? We know that already. That revenge, even when served cold, is also a dish likely to leave you feeling unsatisfied in the end? That case has been made much more persuasively in many other places.

Is it meant to be galvanizing to watch an avatar of dehumanizing capitalism get taken down a peg by an even crueler villain? Why? Or are we supposed to think it’s touching to see a bad guy learn what really matters in life, too late for it to do any good? (The finale does end on a needle drop of Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah,” a bizarrely sentimental choice for an otherwise exhaustingly cold thriller.) Again, why? Is it simply meant to be fun to watch Adam come up with new ways to mess with the Tanners? I wish it were, but his plots are somehow five-dimensional-chess elaborate without ever seeming all that clever.

That Malice can be heartless and brainless need not be a problem; some of my favorite shows are mean and stupid, and downright gleeful about it. What damns it is that it has no hook — nothing for a viewer to latch on to, even as we’re drowning in a veritable sea of similar so-called pleasures. Better to cut this one loose, and wait for something shinier or meatier to enjoy instead.