The Undoing finale review: the twist? We should have known all along

After weeks of us dreaming up theories the killer was finally revealed - and the book was right, we should have known
The Undoing
Sky

How frustrating. After six weeks of dreaming up all manner of creative theories about who killed Elena Alves in Sky thriller The Undoing, it was the obvious suspect all along. You may have fancied Hugh Grant in the Richard Curtis era but it turns out he can play a cold-blooded killer, and a psychopath to boot. It’s murder, actually. 

The premise is nothing new - a beautiful young woman is found dead and the man she was having an affair with looks guilty. The whole series played with us, building tension and twisting to make you suspect a different person at the end of each episode. It turned us into amateur detectives. So I expected something far more confounding in the finale. Although admittedly the twist about running the murder weapon through the dishwasher twice was amusing, and said a lot about how the other half live - no hard scrubbing for New York’s preposterously wealthy. But once I came to terms with my disappointment at being wrong, I realised that The Undoing had done something far more clever in the way it unfolded. 

What director Susanne Bier did so deftly was to show how our instinct is to suspect the wife,  framing her as jealous and unstable, despite the fact that it often is the husband - in this case Jonathan Fraser, paediatric oncologist. One woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK. The way it was filmed played into our prejudices, with experimental camera shots focusing on the eyes of Nicole Kidman (who plays Grace Fraser, Jonathan’s wife). They dart around nervously. But of course she is on edge, the man she loves was not only having an affair with a woman who she has seen naked in the gym changing room, but could be a killer.  It turns out that all Grace was guilty of was a crime against fashion in that Shrek-coloured crushed velvet coat with a hood. Well, that and the breathy theme tune (there were plenty of theories about whether there was a coded message there, with the waxy faced girl playing with flowers).

I was glad to see Grace eventually take off her skyscraper high heels in the finale and do some running. After a lot of psychological drama we got straight action, with helicopters, a chase scene and a lot of talk about fried clams (which do actually sound delicious as described by Grant). 

Grant has had a lot of credit for this show - it is an evolution of him as a villain in Paddington 2. But all the performances were excellent, especially Lily Rabe, who played Sylvia, Kidman’s friend from the school gates. I feel terrible for having suspected her, it turns out she is a hero who just loves gossip. The actors who played the children deserve Oscars - Jonathan and Grace’s son Henry  (played by British actor Noah Jupe, whose mother was Julie Carp in Coronation Street), and Alves’s son Miguel (Edan Alexander) had pain writ large on their faces and it  was through them that the heart of the show came through. The impetuous mistakes of their parents will seriously mess them up and I couldn’t bear some of the court scenes, where you learned that you don’t mess with Sofie Grabol (who played the Alves family’s lawyer, brilliantly countered by Noma Dumezweni for the defence). 

The Undoing was also the perfect length, six episodes released one per week so you couldn’t binge (which was challenging at times and I nearly read the book it is based on, You Should Have Known, by Jean Hanff Korelitz, when I couldn’t bear it any longer).

I would have liked to know more about Grace and Jonathan’s relationship and who his other affair was with (Sylvia?), and Grace’s father (played by Donald Sutherland giving some excellent snark) but that is all fodder for a second series. Fingers crossed, because I miss it already.

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