You don’t see so many stars in the series. The Perfect Stranger is a slow beauty with an Oscars look | Forbes

Director Alfonso Cuarón usually turns to gold. And now, for the first time, he started his own series. Which should be reason enough for connoisseurs to listen to Apple TV +, where The Perfect Stranger premiered on Friday.

It was a wonderful beach holiday in Italy, but then something happened… Robert had to leave the family earlier and his wife Catherine was left alone with little Nicholas for a few days. And that started a series of events that fundamentally changed several destinations.

Whether or not you’ve read Renée Knight’s blueprint for the Perfect Stranger miniseries, you should at least try the series. It was shot by Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, who carefully chooses projects and saves money with them -⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and this one definitely stands out in terms of craftsmanship. according to flow standards.

Definitely because the quality of filmmaking in the creative team is second to none here. As if the name Alfonso Cuarón, director of Descendants of Men, the third installment (and best) in the Harry Potter series, the Oscar-winning works Gravity and Roma, were not enough. He brought along his traditional cinematographer, Oscar-winning Emmanuel Lubezki, and the star is also in front of the camera.

Cate Blanchett plays Catherine Ravenscroft, an investigative journalist and renowned reporter who became famous for uncovering various scandals. Her husband Robert is portrayed by Sacha Baron Cohen; together they become a couple where it is obvious that it will not work out perfectly.

Even the relationship with their teenage son Nicholas is not 100 percent, and the delicate balance is about to be disturbed by the mysterious stranger Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline, another Oscar winner), who wants to confront Catherine with the her secret time.

In short, Apple has money and is not afraid to use it, because the star alone could make your head spin here. But with the series itself, it is a little more complicated.

Over seven episodes, it basically tells a simple story that revolves around a few characters and returns to several key events from different points of view. To complete seven chapters with this, he travels at a deliberate pace that may be too difficult for some viewers.

More than that because we keep coming back to the same environments and sometimes it’s obvious what the characters, and therefore the plot, are going towards. But the Oscar sheen gets the better of him: Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography tricks you into thinking you’re watching a thriller rather than TV, and Blanchett would hope it was as convincing as the Terminator.

The perfect stranger is a show of mostly sad characters haunted by the mistakes of the past, it has a melodramatic touch, there is a lot of sad looking into the distance, stealing and stealing rage. Sometimes it is too much, and Cuarón also uses the voices of the narrators a little unnecessarily, but in this case it is important to overcome the partial defects.

Cuarón knows what he’s talking about, he fills in the puzzle little by little, and just when you think you’ve figured out the script’s game, there’s always an unexpected twist . And those who watch until the finals will definitely not regret it.

At the same time, Apple shows that it has come close to the old synonym of quality TV presented by HBO, since it seems that this small series came from the same stable as You Should Have Known or Bludné kruhy. On the still relatively sparse streaming platform, The Perfect Stranger tends to flop, which is a shame.

His biggest weakness is that he didn’t quite live up to expectations in the step-by-step line. Nevertheless, next to Lords of Heaven, Slow Horses or Lack of Evidence, it is another proof of why you should subscribe to Apple’s streaming platform.