- Network: HBO Max
- Series Premiere Date: Feb 10, 2022
Critic Reviews
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Despite some of its more predictable twists, The Girl Before is riveting, even counterintuitive. Brühlmann, the director, takes material stuffed with clichés and gives it a subtler texture.
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Most viewers will be immediately engrossed. ... The house holds secrets that even this reviewer, a hardened veteran of gloomy gothic mysteries that move at their own pace, didn't see coming. But in addition to the rather glacial progression of Mr. Delaney's adaptation, there's the eternal fascination of real estate and the haunting question of just what one might do to get her mitts on affordable housing.
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It felt fresh, the dialogue wasn't toe-curling and the performances have drawn me in.
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It is tricky to balance heightened mystery with such weighty subject matter but so far, The Girl Before is an intriguing premise, clinically executed.
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No matter how similar two characters look, they are written and performed well enough that they remain (mostly) distinct from one another, and are afforded agency in their own narratives while being lavished with impressively stylish direction.
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“The Girl Before” doesn’t feel like a conventional mystery and that is its strength. It feels akin to a staged performance, with the character predominately relegated to One Folgate Street. Mbatha-Raw and Plummer are powerhouses in a story that sticks with you because it’s a slice of reality.
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It’s the red flags that make it fun.
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While the dual narrative structure creates a sense of foreboding and of history repeating itself, it comes at the price of undermining some of the dramatic tension. Every time the claustrophobia builds, we are thrown back into another timeline.
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J.P. Delaney has stretched his bestseller to four hours, pretty much the bare minimum for calling yourself a TV show, which is at least two hours more time than the story can justify. It’s repetitive, predictable and comfortably outlasts my patience with house-based metaphors.
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“The Girl Before” is content to lean on its twin-timeline premise and a cool-looking house and fails to do anything interesting with either.
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Though the series boasts a strong cast, slick production design, a haunting score from Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, and strong material that could make for a captivating four-part limited series, “The Girl Before” feels thematically aimless, in over its head with narrative threads, and more interested in plot twists than creating relatable, believable characters.
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As the shows progress and they begin mucking around with their hairstyles, difficult morphs into near-impossible and all the doppelganger gimmickry makes it feel like you're sitting through every scene twice. Which, as any good minimalist can tell you, is about 1.5 times too many.
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I found The Girl Before frustrating, if not downright ludicrous at times.
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Every man in this drama is awful. ... The women, by contrast, are sympathetic.
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The Girl Before falls squarely into that bloated-for-television category, taking a succinct thriller story and inflating it to such absurdly unwarranted lengths that any and all sense of suspense is sabotaged. What might have been a nifty 105-minute movie is thus instead a four-hour drag, stretched so thin that its raft of misdirections are plain for all to see, and its underlying emptiness is nearly impossible to ignore.
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The show’s narrative excess comes to seem wasteful and silly — a story about a manipulative architect who wants to help design the lives of the women who live in his construction, and it’s a little boring? And its leveraging of violence against women, including rape, to tell a story that isn’t really worth the time or emotional commitment viewers are asked to make is unfortunate. In all, fans of the book club-thriller genre would be well served by skipping “The Girl Before.”
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