Fight for your own history (nd-aktuell.de)

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There are tons of films about people who lose their memories – from Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” (2000) to the box-office hit “Bourne Identity” (2002) to Michel Gondry’s satirical artwork “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” ( 2004). The thriller series “The Girl in the Water” is now starting on Apple TV, an incredibly tightly narrated, exciting eight-part series about a young woman who loses her entire long-term memory due to a head injury after falling off a ferry boat off the coast of San Francisco.

Sophie (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) lives with her husband James (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who earns a lot of money as a banker, in a chic old building in San Francisco. The two belong to the upper class of California’s boomtown. Why Sophie supposedly tried to commit suicide is unclear as she can’t remember anything. Or was she pushed off the ferry? Does her husband, who seems like a stranger to her in the intensive care unit in the weeks after the coma, possibly have something to do with it? When the policeman Baden (Stephan James), with whom she was apparently friends, contacts her and warns her about her husband, Sophie doesn’t know what to believe anymore.

»The Girl in the Water« is rich in dialogue and staged almost like a chamber play for long stretches. The couple, who are under stress, argues and argues violently with each other again and again. Was the relationship between the two immediately before Sophie’s accident possibly even close to breaking up? James also struggles at work after funds go missing and his investment firm faces an audit. Suddenly there is a lot of capital at stake, and the question soon arises as to whether Sophie’s accident had something to do with it.

Meanwhile, in therapy sessions, she is sworn to come to terms with the loss of her past. But she doesn’t want that at all. »The Girl in the Water« tells of Sophie’s struggle for independence, because she no longer has access to her finances because her husband was appointed as her guardian after the alleged suicide attempt. When her supposedly best friend, Caroline (Ari Graynor), a successful gallery owner, takes her to the chic weekend home, Sophie makes some surprising and disturbing discoveries. The Baden police officer eventually becomes her confidant, and over the course of several weeks, Sophie gradually uncovers her identity.

Although the series is sometimes told very slowly, almost elegiacly and gets lost in an aesthetic navel-gazing of the upper class of San Francisco with insanely noble old buildings, magnificent ballrooms and the subcultural city as a background for Sophie’s daily jogging, »The Girl in the Water« thrillingly exciting every minute. Because Sophie’s research and explorations, the fight against her incapacitation and her own story, which she puts together like a puzzle and which is then partly told in flashbacks, create an extremely fascinating story. Even if it doesn’t seem so at first glance, it has a lot to do with class and social advancement.

To a certain extent, »The Girl in the Water« is also a love story, which tells of the romantic moments of first getting to know each other and a rapid emotional dynamic, but above all sets the stage for the piecemeal and radical eroding of this love relationship. A lot is about commitments, the inability to embrace change, and destructive compulsion to control. The real course of the all-changing event on the ferry is only revealed at the very end.

»The Girl in the Water« on Apple TV – a new episode every week.

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