Killing Eve – “Nice Face” (S1E1, 2018) Review
8/10
A young woman in a Vienna ice cream parlor smiles at a child across the room, holds the smile, and then tips the child’s dessert into her lap on the way out. Ninety seconds later she kills somebody and the episode has told you exactly what it is. The 8 is for an hour that finds a tone nobody else on this page attempts. The violence is real and the tone is comic, and the comedy is never at the expense of the violence. That’s a considerably harder balance than either alone.
This pilot puts a grin on my face and a chill down my back in the same scene, and I can’t think of many hours of television that pull that off. I’m hooked by the ice cream, before anyone dies, and everything after that plays like a reward for paying attention.
What it also does is put two women at the center of a category that’s been men watching men for forty years, and the difference isn’t presentational. It changes what the pursuit is about.
The Opening Ninety Seconds
Villanelle in an ice cream parlor, being charming to a child, and then deliberately ruining her afternoon on the way out for no reason at all. That’s the most efficient character introduction on this page. It establishes that she’s capable of warmth, that the warmth is available on demand, that she uses it, and that she does cruel things for amusement instead of for purpose.
The Vienna killing that follows is staged with the same economy. A crowded street, a man on a bicycle, a knife, and the episode declines to linger on any part of it, because everything the audience needed to know was already established a minute or so earlier using nothing more than a bowl of ice cream and a smile.
No violence occurs in it. The episode teaches the audience who this person is using a dessert, and every killing afterward is read against a scene about ice cream. Compare what Dexter needs to establish the same thing. A kill, a code, a voiceover and ten minutes, where this uses a smile and a wrist.
That ice cream scene beats any kill in the episode. A smile, a flick of the wrist, and I already know I’d follow this woman anywhere the show wants to take her.
Introduce your character through a small cruelty with no purpose. Purposeful harm tells the reader about a plan and pointless harm tells them about a person. The smaller the act, the more it says. A ruined dessert is more informative than a murder.
Establish the capacity for charm before the capacity for violence. The audience then reads every pleasant moment afterward as a choice. Efficiency in an opening isn’t speed. This scene is slow and it’s doing four things at once.
Eve Is Bored
Sandra Oh plays a desk-bound MI5 security officer who’s competent, unremarkable in her own estimation, and has an interest in female assassins that her colleagues find odd. The pilot establishes her domestic life as pleasant and insufficient. A husband who’s kind, a flat, a job that involves paperwork, and a birthday in which she’s entirely present and visibly elsewhere. That’s the engine. Eve isn’t unhappy and she’s not satisfied, and the distinction is what the whole series runs on. Her competence is established by being ignored. She works out what has happened, states it in a meeting, is dismissed, and is proved right in a way that gets her fired instead of promoted.
The detail the episode uses to make the point is a hospital witness. Eve identifies that the only person who saw anything is a woman nobody has interviewed properly, goes to her, and is correct, and the correctness is what costs her the job.
Oh plays the part with an enthusiasm the character keeps having to suppress. When she talks about the killings she becomes animated in a way that embarrasses everybody present including herself. Oh is the reason I buy the whole premise. That suppressed eagerness is a little embarrassing to watch in the best way, and it makes Eve the most human person on the screen. Sandra Oh was reportedly sent the scripts and assumed she was being considered for the assassin, because the idea that she’d be the lead in a British spy thriller hadn’t occurred to her. That’s worth knowing and it’s also visible in how little the performance behaves like a lead.
Comer
Jodie Comer was largely unknown and the performance made her, and the reason is technical range instead of the flamboyance the part could have invited.
Villanelle moves between accents, tones and apparent ages continuously, and the episode shows her doing it deliberately as a working method. She’s Russian, then French, then something else, and the switching is visible as effort in a way that makes her competence legible. Comer is from Liverpool and none of the accents in the series are hers. That’s the kind of fact that only becomes interesting because the character is also performing every time she speaks. What she doesn’t play is enjoyment of killing. The kills are efficient and unremarkable to her, and the enjoyment is reserved for clothes, food, attention and provoking people. That’s a considerably stranger construction. The psychiatrist scene is the best material in the hour. She answers assessment questions correctly, knows exactly what the correct answers are, and is bored by having to supply them, and the sequence is funny and cold at once.
That psychiatrist scene is where Comer wins me over completely. She plays boredom like a weapon, and I laugh at material that ought to chill me, and the show counts on me doing exactly that.
Separate what your character does from what they enjoy. A killer who enjoys killing is a type, and one who’s indifferent to it and delighted by shoes is a person. The gap between occupation and pleasure is where character lives.
Show the performance being performed. A character switching accents on purpose, visibly, tells the reader about skill and about the absence of a stable self at the same time.
Let them answer the assessment correctly. Somebody who knows what the right answers are and finds supplying them tedious is more unsettling than somebody who fails the test.
The Tone Holds
The series is funny and the killings aren’t played for laughs. That’s a distinction a great many works get wrong in this category.
The method is that the comedy comes from character and the violence comes from situation. Villanelle is funny about clothes, about her handler, about a bad hotel. She’s not funny while killing somebody, and the episode never scores a death as a joke.
That’s the same principle Shaun of the Dead works on from the other direction. The genre material is played straight and the people are funny, and neither undercuts the other.
The costume and production design support it. Villanelle’s clothes are the most discussed element of the series and they’re doing character work, because a person who dresses like that is telling you what she wants to be looked at for. Eve’s clothes are doing the opposite job with the same precision. Cardigans, sensible coats, hair pinned up because it’s easier, and a woman who has stopped thinking about how she appears to anybody. That’s why what happens to her hair later matters.
The Pursuit Is Mutual
The structural idea that separates this from everything else on the page is that both women want the other to exist. Eve is looking for Villanelle and doesn’t want to stop looking. Villanelle discovers that somebody is looking and is delighted instead of threatened. Neither of them wants the pursuit to end. That means the show inverts the usual engine of the form.
The hospital scene at the end of the episode is the payoff. The two women are in the same room, neither knows who the other is, and the exchange is about hair.
That line is the series in miniature. An observation about somebody’s appearance, delivered kindly, by a person who has come to kill somebody else.
That hair exchange gives me goosebumps. It’s a tiny moment to hang a whole series on, and I think the writers are right to hang it there. What the arrangement produces is a series about attention instead of about capture. Both women have been unseen in different ways and have found somebody who’s looking, and everything that follows is about what that’s worth to each of them.
Fiona Shaw and Kim Bodnia are the two handlers and both are better than the roles require. Carolyn is unreadable in a way that’s played entirely as administrative politeness, and Konstantin is a man managing an asset he’s privately fond of.
Invert the engine. If your pursuit’s participants both want it to continue, every scene changes meaning, because capture becomes a loss for the pursuer as well. The requirement is that both must have a reason. Eve is bored and Villanelle is unseen, and neither reason is about the other’s profession. A first meeting where neither party knows the other is a gift and it can only be used once. Spend it on something trivial.
Ask what your two leads want from each other instead of what they want to do to each other. The second is a plot and the first is a series.
Should you watch Killing Eve S1E1?
Yes, and stop after the first season. It’s an 8 because this hour does something the genre rarely tries: an assassin introduced through a ruined ice cream, a bored woman animated by the wrong subject, a tone that’s funny about everything except the killing, and a pursuit neither woman wants to end. I hold back from a 9 because a pilot is mostly setup, and the best of this chase is still in front of it.
