'We Hunt Together' Episode 1 Review: Will sexual tension and knowing the killers help the thriller survive?
Spoilers for Episode 1
The sexual tension between opposites is a trope utilized to depraved disproportion in pop culture fiction. There is no teasing if they won't anymore, there's a certain lucid comfort in just getting it out of the way that seems to have garnered its own cult level audience. And intense crime thrillers, transcending beyond genres, are an easy narrative to sprinkle all that dark, gritty content into. Showtime's latest neo-noir thriller 'We Hunt Together' is an ambitious emblem of trying to be edgy but chill at the same time — an attempt at trying to be different in a sea of repetitive procedurals and its only rival — female-led nordic noirs. At least the pilot lays down so.
The pilot opens with two striking incidents. A neon-lit nightclub with catchy music and a young woman being almost preyed upon by a significantly older man (Nigel Harman). He slams her inside a toilet cubicle and the toilet-worker is immediately drawn to protect this girl. Elsewhere, three days later, DS Lola Franks' (Eve Myles) usual check-in at a murder investigation is interrupted by her new, over the top cheery boss DI Jackson Mendy (Babou Ceesay). Their murder scene is a man lying upside dead, spread apart, and handcuffed to his bed. There's a ball gag in his mouth and a knife dug all the way inside the nape of his neck. And thus is laid the groundwork of this primary whydunnit plot, where the who has already been established.
In that, the first episode lays down that Baba (Dipo Ola) and Freddy (Hermoine Corfield) — the young couple at the nightclub — have killed this older man. There's a fair bit of back and forth that goes between Baba saving Freddy from getting raped by him in the streets, and the older man turning up dead. It starts with the fateful night where Baba beats the older man to a pulp. Freddy doesn't report the crime, gets confronted by the older man, and decides to kill him together with Baba. It's both defensive and manipulative. Corfield's charm is that cocky vulnerability she pours into the character and Ola plays his Baba entranced.
We don't really see them having sex but the tension between them is lacerated with how far the former child soldier is willing to go for a girl he just met. It's a little extra, but fast-paced enough to not make it a total drag. They are fun, they go to funfairs, they have fun, they dance, they make love and they kill together. It is 'Natural Born Killers', only less disruptive and more trippy, borrowing its vigilante neo-noir narrative from Nicholas Winding Refn's 'Too Old to Die Young', and its velvety provocation from the auteur's 'Neon Demon'.
On the other side of the narrative is unfolding the attraction between even more radical opposites — Lola and Jackson. Lola is very protective of her secrets, but of course, the new guy at work is able to crack through all the concrete that years of trusted colleagues she has worked with couldn't. Lola is your classic seasoned cop, who questions her new boss's capabilities because of his bubbling family man persona. But the first episode shows enough camaraderie to hint the inevitable: although he has a wife and kids, Jackson and Lola are going to be a thing. There was no need for this bit of development because we have enough confusing drug imposed euphoria in Baba and Freddy's world, but sure, do everything but solve the crime.
Kidding, there is enough promise to make one look forward to another episode, have to give writer Gaby Hull that. The creator of ITV’s 'Cheat' brings a familiar sense of righteous picking of the psyche to the table once again. Corfield's femme fatale is contrasted by the 'I make an attempt to be tomboyish' cop that Myles, despite her many accolades, tries to blend into the plot. She stands out, but not always for the best of reasons. Ceesay channels this undeniable hope even amid the most depraved of crime scenes that is both infectious and somewhat disturbing.
It would all be way more alluring if the characters weren't so pompous about who they are and how deep run their freak. Everything is a little too tailored to aim for perfection but doesn't quite reach, nor land gracefully. It's scenic, a sight to behold in dimly lit rooms on a slow Tuesday afternoon. The trip-hop soundtrack almost makes one expect Kavinsky's 'Nightcall' to seep through the doors any moment, once again surprising us with a tasteful melancholy that Netflix's 'The end of the F*cking World' did with its tracks. Here's hoping it picks up the same way the Netflix UK production did.
'We Hunt Together' will air on Sundays at 10 pm ET/PT on Showtime.
