Prime Video’s ‘Malice’ Casts David Duchovny in a Lackluster ‘Ripley’ Riff: TV Review

For a thriller, the Amazon Prime Video series “Malice” is curiously devoid of tension. Right from the beginning, it’s clear that the handsome, affable Adam (Jack Whitehall) is up to no good when he turns up at the Greek vacation home of the ultra-wealthy Tanner family. We know this because “Malice” opens with a flash forward to Adam being detained by customs officials at an American airport, then presented with evidence that some terrible-but-unspecified fate has befallen Tanner patriarch Jamie (David Duchovny). Adam doesn’t even feign surprise, telling his interrogator that Jamie was “not a nice man.” That “Malice” never circles back to this teaser is one of many signs the show is oddly listless, both loosely plotted and lacking in suspense.

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Creator and writer James Wood (“The Great,” “Trying”) triple-underlines that Adam is a shady interloper with a visual so on-the-nose I’m hesitant to use the term “metaphor.” Adam’s arrival — as a tutor to the children of the Tanners’ close friends Jules (Christine Adams) and Damien (Raza Jaffrey), invited along to the families’ shared weekend getaway — is precipitated by a snake infiltrating the Tanners’ azure-blue pool. The scene swaps water for grass, but the meaning is the same: Adam is bad news and not to be trusted. Would you believe the Tanners don’t heed the symbolic warning?

Adam wastes no time ingratiating himself with all five Tanners: Jamie, a crass venture capitalist; Nat (Carice van Houten), a model turned fashion entrepreneur; their kids April (Teddie Allen) and Dexter (Phoenix Laroche); and Kit (Harry Gilby), Jamie’s son from a previous marriage. There are already cracks in the Tanners’ smooth veneer of affluence even before Adam starts exploiting them. Kit is in some unspecified trouble at school, a vague conflict that never establishes whether the teenager actually did anything wrong and therefore much about his personality. Jamie funds Nat’s business, keeping her firmly within his control: “She has all the style and taste and I have all the money,” he explains. Before Jules and Damien arrive with Adam in tow, the two have perfunctory sex while Nat flips through a magazine, a genuinely funny image that portends more tongue-in-cheek class satire to come.

But “Malice” loses this sense of playfulness once Adam gets to work. The six episodes suffer from a lack of fixed perspective. Adam’s intentions are never hidden; he announces to a drunken, passed-out Jamie that “I could kill you right now if I wanted — but I’m not gonna do that, because I want you to suffer” on his very first night in town. And “Malice” cultivates no mystery around whether Jamie had it coming, as Adam claims. Jamie comes off like an insensitive jerk, but Adam is so creepy there’s no doubt who’s the villain here.

Yet “Malice” obscures just enough of Adam’s nefarious actions to withhold the joys of watching an elaborate plan executed to a tee. For instance, he seems to frame Jamie for physically assaulting the Tanners’ elderly Greek neighbor during their drunken escapades, yet we never see him do it. There’s no question of responsibility — only of how Adam concealed his identity or got away from Jamie for enough time to severely beat a stranger. One wonders if “Malice” simply didn’t feel like answering such questions and decided to skip over them.

Nor are we fully situated in the point of view of the Tanners, because we can’t be blindsided along with them. Damien briefly assumes the role of the suspicious investigator who digs into Adam’s past as everyone else blithely plays along, but his storyline is swiftly discarded before he finds anything interesting or revelatory. (He does confront Adam with a news story that seems to show him getting arrested in Thailand for killing a sex worker. Adam unconvincingly claims the culprit is an estranged half-brother. Is this Southeast Asian interlude ever explained in further detail? It is not! But we do get sporadic, random scenes of Adam hanging out in sex clubs to show something’s off with him.) 

Even Adam’s motive for targeting Jamie is easy to deduce, generating no surprise when it’s finally spelled out. The presence of Adam’s sister Sophie (Charlotte Riley) is indicative of the series’ frustrating half-in, half-out approach. Their conversations reveal just enough to keep Adam from being an intriguing enigma, but remain so oblique they leave sizeable blind spots in his backstory. The locations, too, toggle unproductively: Adam follows the Tanners back to London before returning to Greece in the finale. Rather than the focus of a single trip gone horribly awry, we get a tiny taste of the Tanners’ typical routine before it’s disrupted. 

“Malice” arrives a year and a half after the Netflix series “Ripley” put Patricia Highsmith’s iconic grifter back in the spotlight. A relatively impoverished scammer worming his way into a wealthy target’s life with murderous intent instantly conjures Tom Ripley in his many incarnations, from Highsmith’s writing to Anthony Minghella’s sun-soaked, star-minting film. (Or Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn,” a de facto Ripley tale if technically an original work.) The recent success of HBO’s “The White Lotus” and its many imitators raises the bar still higher: the culture is now positively awash in rich people behaving badly, and sometimes getting their comeuppance, in a stunning location. “Malice” has little to add to this long list of antecedents. Neither Duchovny or Whitehall, who mostly works as a comedian, deepen their characters beyond “callous rich guy” or “vindictive psychopath.” From performances to plot, much of “Malice” feels like it’s on autopilot. Watching it feels much the same. 

All six episodes of “Malice” are now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.