This version, whose first two episodes are now streaming, with subsequent installments dropping on Fridays, does branch out in some timely and provocative new directions. But its excessive length—and specifically the amount of unnecessary explanation and repetition stuffed in to fill that runtime—kills much of the suspense. The mix of innovation and bloat yields a show that is both better than you might expect and disappointing in the same ways that most film-to-TV adaptations are. Where it does excel, so much so as to almost single-handedly warrant the project, is in its casting. No actor is more suited to remake Max Cady in his own image than Javier Bardem, a master of charm and menace. His presence elevates scripts that can be expository to the point of condescension, introducing ambiguity where it’s needed most.
From left: Amy Adams, Patrick Wilson, and Lily Collias in Cape Fear —Apple TV
Max’s sudden, early release, after the suicide of a former mistress who left behind seemingly conclusive evidence that it was really she who murdered his wife, shatters the Bowdens’ veneer of domestic bliss. Not that Antosca doesn’t make the cracks painfully visible from the beginning. Zack has withdrawn from family and friends following a disturbing incident at school. Speaking to a TV reporter (Anna Baryshnikov) who asks to interview her in the den of her luxurious home, Anna demurs, explaining that it’s “the part of the house we don’t share with the outside world.” Even if this weren’t a remarkably strange way of saying that the room is under construction, it would be a heavy-handed metaphor for the shame hiding in the most intimate corners of this grand household. In case we didn’t get the hint that all is not well at the Bowden residence, midway through the interview, cameras catch Natalie pulling four dead skunks of varying sizes out of the pool. “It was a dad and a mom and two babies,” Anna tells Tom later, presumably for the benefit of anyone who was scrolling on their phone when the skunks were discovered.
With so many more hours to fill, Antosca builds a storyline around every character without giving them much depth. (Zack feels especially thin, a generic troubled boy whose personality seems cobbled together from masculinity-crisis headlines.) It’s on the actors to add dimensions, an unfair challenge to which Bardem, Adams, and Collias rise. Other diversions include drugs and the occult, plus so many toxic father-child relationships, they feel less like a theme than a cry for help. Stylistic homages to Scorsese’s Cape Fear, most notably the X-ray effect that heightens the film’s sense of disorientation, are repeated so often, they lose their nightmarish charge.
Javier Bardem and Amy Adams in Cape Fear —Apple TVYet Bardem’s is the rare lead performance powerful enough to carry a show. While previous Maxes have beguiled through the sheer force of their evil, Bardem works more like an audio engineer, crossfading between charm and wrath, woundedness and belligerence, righteous anger and nihilistic predation until Max becomes as cohesive as he is opaque. His precisely calibrated interactions with the Bowdens reveal the problems they try to hide: Zack’s abjection. Natalie’s anxieties about her sexuality and frustration with her parents’ self-involvement. Tom’s insecurities about his ability to protect Anna and the kids. Anna’s need to believe that she is, despite any past missteps, a good person. The family’s quiet estrangement from one another.
Max is seductive enough to give us hope—even after we’ve heard him coach a woman he once, presumably, cared for through suicide—that he didn’t kill his wife and is somehow justified in every other awful thing we see him do to punish the people who put him in prison. If you find yourself suspecting, as I did, that those entitled Bowdens might be the real villains all along, you’ll know Bardem got under your skin.
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