Fool Me Once, review: a bonkers thriller you'll gobble down as guiltily as the leftover chocs
Netflix’s big New Year whodunit, Fool Me Once, also functions as part of the Michelle Keegan extended universe in that it invites us to imagine what might have happened when her character from military drama Our Girl went back to civvie street.
Keegan is scintillatingly stony-faced as Maya, a former army ace whose hold on reality is falling apart like smoking ammo clips emptying from one of the eclectic selection of machine guns she keeps in her kitchen. She has, to be fair, a lot to contend with throughout a wonderfully bonkers thriller that chucks in red herrings and bombshells with a weapons-grade air of mischief.
Her husband, Joe (Richard Armitage), and sister, Claire (Natalie Anderson), have died violently in separate incidents within the space of a few months. In addition, a shadow hangs over her military career courtesy of an ongoing saga involving an army whistleblower. And she has a mother-in-law from hell, as played by an imperious Joanna Lumley.
It’s enough to make you go mad. But is that, in fact, what is happening to Maya? Days after Joe’s funeral, she spots something jaw-dropping on a nanny cam. It throws into question everything she’d been led to believe about his shooting by two muggers on motorbikes. When she confronts the nanny, her reward is pepper spray to the face. Next comes a disapproving call from Lumley’s Judith, who makes no secret of regarding Joe as too good for “bit of rough” Maya.
So begins a slaloming descent into paranoia. Questions arise over the killing of Claire during a break-in – and a possible connection with Joe’s death. Plus, Maya has major anger management issues. This is made clear when she rips the trousers off a bullying coach at an underage football match. Meanwhile, a Scooby Doo-style subplot finds Claire’s teenage kids stumbling across an old camera belonging to their mother. It opens the door to dark secrets from the past.
Fool Me Once is the latest Netflix adaptation of a Harlan Coben bestseller to relocate the action from the United States to Britain (the book is set in New York, the series shot in Manchester). It retains Coben’s flair for a twisting, turning tale. There is also a human interest story in the form of a hapless detective (Adeel Akhtar), whose deteriorating health frustrates his attempts to track down Joe’s killer.
But it’s Keegan’s show, and she impresses as a woman working through battlefield trauma even as she discovers her seemingly happy marriage wasn’t all she thought it to be. She must contend, too, with a scenery-devouring Lumley – if Lumley doesn’t quite act Keegan off-screen, she is nonetheless fantastically formidable. Throw in a plot that moves like a slinky on steroids and you have a post-Christmas thriller to cherish.
Fool Me Once is on Netflix from New Year’s Day
