It’s not as easy to bring a conspiracy to life on screen as it once was. Gone are the days of seedy thrillers and neo-noirs operating on the now-laughable premise that corruption is invisible to the average person’s naked eye. Closer on the horizon, yet still behind us, are conspiratorial thrillers based around big, dangerous emotions: think the aggressive patriotism of “24” or the paranoid individualism of “Mr. Robot.” The past few years have seen the world pushed into an era of high conspiracy, in which talk of plots and cover-ups are both more mainstream and more baffling than ever. The latest on-screen story to grapple with the task of capturing a 21st-century conspiracy is the Apple TV+ series “Suspicion,” but it doesn’t put up a strong fight.
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“Suspicion” is based on a 2015 Israeli show, “False Flag,” but this English-language adaptation transports the action to London and New York. The series opens with the son of a major PR executive being kidnapped in a hotel hallway. He’s attacked by a group of assailants in British royal masks, who force him to get into a suitcase. Soon after, four people are detained and questioned regarding his disappearance. They’re all Brits who were at the New York hotel at the time of the attack. They’re abruptly plucked from their lives–one, even, in the middle of a wedding–and accused of being at the center of an international conspiracy.
Unfortunately, “Suspicion” never gets much more exciting than its opening scene. The series is a run-of-the-mill thriller that remains stubbornly muted for much of its eight-episode first season. The series includes plenty of action as the detainees are embroiled in a conspiracy that’s bigger than any one of them, but it keeps its secrets for far too long. The result is a plot that feels unmoored. There are no compelling underpinnings on which to build the central mystery, and when it’s finally solved, it’s in an eleventh-hour twist that lands with a dull impact.
The problems with “Suspicion” certainly don’t fall with its talented cast. Uma Thurman plays Katherine Newman, the cool and collected mother of the kidnapped young man. She’s in the series much less than promotional materials would suggest. When she does appear, it’s with an intriguingly guarded sense of authority that offers a glimpse at what a more interesting version of the show–one that centered her instead of sidelining her–could have looked like.
As for the accused, they play their parts well, too. Elizabeth Henstridge is an Oxford professor who’s edged out of her job after her name hits the news, and Tom Rhys Harries is one of the college’s students. Kunal Nayyar is a carpet salesman with a secret side gig–each of these people has secrets that are for the most part swiftly revealed early in the series. Georgina Campbell is the bride-to-be who is yanked into a cop car in her wedding dress, while Lydia West, who was so excellent in “It’s A Sin” last year, steals scenes as her concerned sister.
Aside from Thurman, the series’ greatest standout is another underutilized player. Noah Emmerich, who played FBI Agent Stan Beeman in “The Americans” for five seasons, returns here as a federal agent once more. As one of the only Americans in the main ensemble, his agent brushes up against the walls of his own stereotype, bristling at the limitations of his badge and seeming just edgy enough to maybe take matters into his own hands. In one of the most insightful exchanges of the series, he tells his British partner (played by Angel Coulby) that the U.K. is just as corrupt as the U.S. “You guys just had more time to practice hiding things,” he says.
Still, even Emmerich’s presence can’t save the show from falling flat. “Suspicion” is thoroughly self-serious, which is fine, but it also refuses to incorporate any sense of visual style. Shows like Netflix’s highly stylized “Money Heist” or the aforementioned techno-thriller “Mr. Robot” have set a high bar for cinematic flair within the sub-genre. “Suspicion” certainly doesn’t need to meet that bar to be any good, but even by the standard of subdued British crime dramas, it’s exceedingly airless. “The Americans” director Chris Long tries to give the series a better sense of shape, but without an “Americans”-level hook to get us engaged early on, there’s only so much he can do.
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The tail end of “Suspicion” picks up its pace, but ultimately leaves its most intriguing elements barely examined. In “False Flag,” it’s not the child of a media mogul who’s kidnapped, but the Iranian minister of defense. The fallout that follows is deeply political in nature, and the show dives deep into the real-world implications of being publicly accused of an act of terrorism. Removed from its original context, “Suspicion” flails about in search of equally significant meaning. It eventually touches–lightly and fleetingly–on issues of sexual misconduct, science denial, and corruption. Mostly, though, the show is concerned with the capital-T truth, a concept that it points out can be easily shaped by powerful forces.
The conspiracy thriller isn’t dead. It’s just more complicated than it once was. If filmmakers choose to present questions about where sketchy money leads, or show angry crowds chanting, they have a duty to understand that these are fictional facsimiles of real-life situations that have launched American democracy into a tailspin in recent years. “Suspicion,” for all its twists and turns, thrives in the uncomplicated. It only worries about the truth of the conspiracies at its core insofar as they impact our somewhat unremarkable main characters.
To say that “Suspicion” is afraid of saying anything real would be inaccurate, as Thurman’s character awkwardly explains the show’s whole thesis statement in a speech late in the series. Yet “Suspicion” still doesn’t seem to know exactly what it’s saying, repurposing its more political source material into a series of middle-of-the-road thriller beats that are never as gripping as they aim to be. [C]