Ivan Radford | On 12, May 2024

There’s a lot to be said for the opportunities that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has provided to actors and directors, but there’s no doubt that it paradoxically also reduces their opportunities elsewhere due to the sheer time commitment involved. Elizabeth Olsen is one of the many stars sucked into the MCU and she has shone as Wanda/the Scarlet Witch – including in her own spin-off series, WandaVision – but it came with the diappointing knowledge that she could be doing interesting and exciting work elsewhere. Love & Death, HBO Max’s true crime drama, is a perfect example: the miniseries is a riveting and knotty drama full of conlicting sympathies and disturbing complexities. And Elizabeth Olsen clearly relishes sinking her teeth into such meaty material.

Penned by David E Kelley (The Undoing, Big Little Lies), the seven-part drama retells the story of Candy Montgomery, a housewife in 80s Texas with a picture-perfect lifestyle. She has a loyal husband, Pat (Patrick Fugit). She’s involved at church. And she’s also, by the end of these grisly events, an axe murderer.

If you don’t know the details of the case, we won’t go into them, but it all begins with a niggling sense of ennui – and that leads her to pursue attention and affection from Allan Gore, a fellow churchgoer. Played by Jesse Plemons, he’s a perfectly imperfect crush, with little charisma, a passive calmness and no real appetite for an affair. But once he’s agreed to make a pros and cons list before deciding what to do, there’s an inevitability to their infidelity. And so a not-particularly-torrid dalliance begins in a string of motel encounters.

The up and downs of their entanglement unfold with a welcome lack of melodrama, and Love & Death benefits from treating everything with matter-of-fact mundanity, including Allan’s own marriage to Betty (Lily Rabe). Which makes the eventual axe-swinging all the more unsettling – all 41 blows of it. When Candy argues that it was a defensive act, it feels dubious to say the least but there’s also an intriguing blend of disassociation and frankness that makes her a magnetic watch.

Olsen is superb in every second of screentime she gets, which is almost every frame of the series, and she treads the line carefully between sensitive and sensational – the drama avoids feeling like it’s exploited these tragic real-life events for entertainment. Whether it’s ever possible to explain why Candy did what she did is part of the compelling tension of it all, as Kelley and Olsen tease answers but also underline how unknowable such darkness can be. The only downside is that there’s perhaps little room for the impressive ensemble cast to match the show’s lead, although Krysten Ritter (as Candy’s friend, Sherry), Rabe and Plemons all bring depth to roles that could have been underwritten and underwhelming. The result is a shocking, thought-provoking and commendably patient study of a surprising and sad story.

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