The Girlfriend is a wild ride. At first glance, it appears to have rough similarities with Hush, a psychological thriller that explores dynamics between a mother and her daughter-in-law to-be. In reality, this series managed to increase intensity to levels that Hush did not.
I suspect that the viewer base is expected to “take sides.” Who is in the right, the girlfriend or the mother? Yet, the question seems facile. Although the series is a war of perspective, the first “hit” was the constant put-downs that Laura (the mother) made toward Cherry (the girlfriend).
It is indeed suspicious that Cherry took Laura’s clasp, and that she was familiar with the painting in Laura’s salon. But, after seeing Cherry’s perspective, we come to understand that she is just a girl who got carried away and came home with her boyfriend without his parents’ knowledge. We may not like her actions, but they really aren’t anything groundbreaking. On the other hand, her lies about her background–while unfortunate–are not unusual for those trying to climb the social ladder.
So, rather than try to figure out the reality of what’s going on with Cherry, Laura makes some of the worst possible assumptions. We also know that, given the same evidence, others did not jump to the same conclusions. Laura and her husband both met Cherry at the same time, and we know that the husband wouldn’t dare cross the boundaries that Laura did.
Laura is clearly the initial perpetrator, but Cherry feeds into it: What we witness becomes a tit-for-tat competition for revenge culminating in Laura faking her son’s death to prevent her from marrying him.
The most tense moment of the series, for me, was when Cherry confronted Laura in the elevator. Laura had done so much to engineer Cherry’s downfall, and the entire series shifts: Cherry gets her life back and Laura enters a freefall.
In spite of the “reveal” in the last minute of the series, it seems to me that the message isn’t entirely fair. The only unjustified behavior that we saw of Cherry is the surprise at her ex’s wedding. Cherry’s mother, clearly has more experience than the viewers do, but they do little to vindicate Laura’s attempt to entirely remove her (which seems to me to have been less about Cherry and more about her inability to accept that her son could be with a woman who isn’t her–Freud might have some comments about this).
For the most part, the series is thematically uninteresting: it relies heavily on drama, often unnecessarily so. The one exception is its interrogation of perspective: to what extent does the way we experience reality (phenomena) reflect actual reality (noumena)? I suspect that the showrunners would say, “Not very much!”
If you want an intense, and entertaining, psychological thriller, The Girlfriend is worth your time. If you want something more substantive, it’s better to look elsewhere.
Full Series
The Girlfriend is a wild ride. At first glance, it appears to have rough similarities with Hush, a psychological thriller that explores dynamics between a mother and her daughter-in-law to-be. In reality, this series managed to increase intensity to levels that Hush did not.
I suspect that the viewer base is expected to “take sides.” Who is in the right, the girlfriend or the mother? Yet, the question seems facile. Although the series is a war of perspective, the first “hit” was the constant put-downs that Laura (the mother) made toward Cherry (the girlfriend).
It is indeed suspicious that Cherry took Laura’s clasp, and that she was familiar with the painting in Laura’s salon. But, after seeing Cherry’s perspective, we come to understand that she is just a girl who got carried away and came home with her boyfriend without his parents’ knowledge. We may not like her actions, but they really aren’t anything groundbreaking. On the other hand, her lies about her background–while unfortunate–are not unusual for those trying to climb the social ladder.
So, rather than try to figure out the reality of what’s going on with Cherry, Laura makes some of the worst possible assumptions. We also know that, given the same evidence, others did not jump to the same conclusions. Laura and her husband both met Cherry at the same time, and we know that the husband wouldn’t dare cross the boundaries that Laura did.
Laura is clearly the initial perpetrator, but Cherry feeds into it: What we witness becomes a tit-for-tat competition for revenge culminating in Laura faking her son’s death to prevent her from marrying him.
The most tense moment of the series, for me, was when Cherry confronted Laura in the elevator. Laura had done so much to engineer Cherry’s downfall, and the entire series shifts: Cherry gets her life back and Laura enters a freefall.
In spite of the “reveal” in the last minute of the series, it seems to me that the message isn’t entirely fair. The only unjustified behavior that we saw of Cherry is the surprise at her ex’s wedding. Cherry’s mother, clearly has more experience than the viewers do, but they do little to vindicate Laura’s attempt to entirely remove her (which seems to me to have been less about Cherry and more about her inability to accept that her son could be with a woman who isn’t her–Freud might have some comments about this).
For the most part, the series is thematically uninteresting: it relies heavily on drama, often unnecessarily so. The one exception is its interrogation of perspective: to what extent does the way we experience reality (phenomena) reflect actual reality (noumena)? I suspect that the showrunners would say, “Not very much!”
If you want an intense, and entertaining, psychological thriller, The Girlfriend is worth your time. If you want something more substantive, it’s better to look elsewhere.