Apple’s Cape Fear Is Total Trash But An Absolute Blast

Spoiler warning for all 10 episodes of Apple’s Cape Fear.

Apple’s Cape Fear series is caught between prestige television and trashy soap opera melodrama. I approached the show thinking it’d be the former: Apple are on a hot streak of great shows, the cast is excellent, the production values top notch. As the 10-episode season progressed it became clear the show was leaning much more towards the latter. It is a ridiculous, outlandish series. It begins silly (the opening sequence showing a character surviving a gunshot wound to the head and having to essentially commit suicide twice in quick succession) and grows stupider. You cannot take it seriously. It’s dumb and at times bad television yet I couldn’t help but be charmed and engaged by its trashy sensibilities.

It shouldn’t be a surprise the show turned out this way. The 1991 film version of the story is the same way. Because Scorsese and DeNiro have such a rich history of incredible work, it’s easy to lump their Cape Fear film in with Goodfellas and Raging Bull. But they shouldn’t be uttered in the same breath. It’s an insane, absurd film. It’s great fun, and it’s clear they were having a blast making it, but having just rewatched it, it is not particularly good. The new series takes more inspiration from the Scorsese film than the 1962 version or the original novel.

This includes the visual style. There are the cool negative shots, as well as crash zooms and whip pans. But there’s not enough. If you’re going to go for that visual flair then commit. The show never stays in that heightened state for long enough, dropping the tempo back down. That’s the stuff that works, when the visuals match the bonkers plot, like Max standing on the roof of the house during the storm or that great panning shot at the end of episode 5 revealing he’d moved in next door. Go big or go home. And what a gorgeous home it is, so big a psycho can be living in the walls and nobody notices. It’s a great looking show, with vibrant colours and a real sense of humidity, rather than the desaturated cool look so prevalent on television today.

Cape Fear is Max Cady’s story, despite the focus always being more prominent on the family he’s terrorising, and I think Javier Bardem is superb. It’s such a fun performance, so much so that I found myself rooting for him in the middle of the season when the family themselves began to grate. This issue is that with the story stretched out over ten hours, Cady has little to do for large swathes of the show. He’s threatening and imposing at the beginning, and the writers desperately try to claw some of that danger back for the finale, but he’s sidelined for much of the middle. They try and make him goofy to appear disarming but when he doesn’t do anything else he is just goofy and disarming.

I was never fully satisfied with this version of Max Cady. While he’s apparently masterminding everything we don’t actually see that because the show wants to convince us he may be innocent, and by the time he’s truly revealed as a villain, other characters take over. We never see him talk to Neveah face-to-face once. Despite the time we spend with Max, we don’t get enough of him actually taking on the family. Sure, he can execute some contrived Machiavellian plots but sooner or later I want to see him go mad with a knife and it’s too little too late.

Max’s proxy Nevaeh has all the fun (and the remixes of the iconic moments from the 1991 film) in the season’s first half and then Crystal dominates the second. The writers clearly loved the idea of Juliette Lewis as a deranged killer in the show, the opposite end of the spectrum from her role in the 1991 film, but they probably should have just gender-swapped Max and had her play the role. Maxine Cady. Her being the killer of Max’s wife was a disappointing twist that trapped Max in a lame middle ground. Either make him guilty or totally innocent. Either one is an engaging story: him seeking revenge or justice. The show explains that Max didn’t kill his wife but he might as well have done. In that case, have him do it, or have him be a good man before he was sent to prison.

I think the show has a great set up with plenty of interesting avenues to explore. I will argue that the first six episodes are truly good, with a nice balance between the genuine drama and the heightened melodrama. Then the final four episodes are a flurry of messy plotting and inscrutable character choices. The joyful silliness becomes straight stupidity. The plot resembles a snake twisting and turning on itself until it self constricts, choking on its own contrived, incestuous lore. It all becomes about secret relationships, who had sex with who 17 years ago, a tangled family tree. There are three separate reveals of characters being Max’s children. I started questioning my own parentage.

While the show doubles back on Max’s backstory, plot threads from the present are dropped entirely. Remember when Anna found Nevaeh’s mother brutally murdered, her head bashed in? The writers seemingly don’t. She’s covered in blood and even leaves her prints on the murder weapon but this is never mentioned again. Is the body still just sitting there? You’d think the cops would have paid her a visit when her daughter was arrested and imprisoned. And then Anna hiring her hated, unpredictable father to plant drugs in Max’s house might be the single stupidest plan anyone has ever had. It comes back to bite her when her dad briefly sides with Max, but there are no real consequences and he’s not seen again.

The series begins as overamped and overripe in a fun way but it ends as a melodramatic soap opera with character relationships harder to keep track of than House of the Dragon. I thought the show had an interesting perspective on the daughter struggling with the situation, until she starts acting like a cliché, sneaking sips of alcohol from a brown bag and making the dumbest decisions imaginable. Every plot point became a multi-stage twist and the genuine character drama, the true conflict, gets lost in the mix as the once simple story overextends itself. Cape Fear is a slow burn, a long detonation cord sparking away as the flame slowly creeps towards the explosive, only to extinguish itself just before it reaches it by adding too many loops and tangles to the cord.

And yet I couldn’t stop watching. In fact, I watched every episode as soon as it was available in the UK, on Friday mornings before leaving for work. The more ludicrous the show became, the more addictive it became. It’s a show I love to hate, an absolute blast to watch, and every time the bombastic original music kicks in I feel like cheering. Plus, each episode also had a few moments that I genuinely love too, highlighting the potential within the absurdity. I knew CCH Pounder would have a pulpy line worth coming back to the show for (“This motherfucker’s balls deep in the organisation I spent my whole life building”) and the eventual promise that sooner or later Max is going to drop the pretence and finally start trying to kill them all.

And, eventually, he does. The ending is… fine. I enjoy the home invasion idea, it feels more personal than setting the finale on the houseboat. And I don’t mind Max surviving: that’s how the 1962 film ends. But if Max’s ultimate fate is to remain behind bars, to feel satisfying after 10 episodes we need at least a coda of him back in prison: either truly defeated or more rageful than ever. That fact we are denied that final shot of him back in his cage makes me terrified they are planning a second season.

Anna, literally, looking over her shoulder is an ending but is it the ending? There’s some potential wiggle room on whether Crystal and Luke survived, too. I don’t know if I can bare to go through it all again. Max breaking out of prison for another chance at revenge. I feel like I have my own abusive relationship with this show. It keeps pulling me back even though I know it’s not healthy. It’s only going to end in tears and disappointment and heartbreak. But while it’s very silly and trashy I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a good time.