Crime Thriller shows review: The patient, Inside Man & The Watcher

The patient show on Hulu poster

I was sick this week, flu/COVID can’t tell the difference. I didn’t have medicine to put me to sleep so I started watching crime series to take my focus away from the pain and fever. Since I didn’t have the energy to do the research, I picked from Netflix’s top 10. Here is the list of shows I watched from best to worst:

1. The Patient (Hulu)
5/5
The patient show on Hulu poster

I have been watching ‘The Patient’ episodes as they came out each week. I don’t usually do that, I like to binge-watch the entire series. But when I watched the first episode I wasn’t aware that the other episodes are not out yet and I was already hooked. The series has 10 episodes and it is worth watching because of the unique story. It is nothing like I have seen before.

It is a psychological thriller. A serial killer starts seeking therapy to control himself from killing more people. When the therapist tells him the only way it’s going to work is if the patient is honest with him. So as the next obvious step, he kidnaps his therapist and chains him in the basement. From there on, we know it is not going to end well for at least one of them. The patient blames his abusive father for his illness, but weirdly the show is more focused on the therapist’s relationship with his son.

Chained in the basement of a serial killer’s house, the therapist knows he probably won’t see his family again. He regrets not having a healthy relationship with his son after his wife’s death. His son’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism strained his relationship with the rest of the family practicing Liberal Judaism. This is also the first series I have seen which shows Jewish religion and family culture. At one point, the therapist admits to being more sympathetic toward the serial killer than toward his own son.

Each character is so complex that you can’t hate anyone. Neither the serial killer who killed two more innocent people while in therapy nor the son who refused to be with his dying mother. You know it is wrong but it is hard to hate them. I don’t know if it makes sense. As expected, there is no happy ending to the show. One person is chained in the basement, and the other is dead. There is a conclusion to the story with enough room for the viewer’s speculation.

It is a short and crisp (4 episodes) British crime thriller. The theme is set in the first scene, when pushed into a corner we can do things for survival that we didn’t realize we were capable of. On the train, when a man started harassing two women, a bystander started pretending to telecast the incident on her Fb live and scared the man away, even though she didn’t have the app on her phone. The woman who was being harassed on the train was a criminal journalist. She wanted to interview the ‘Fb live’ woman and texted her to set up a meeting. In reply, she gets a weird 2-second blur video from her. When she tries to contact her again the phone is turned off and she is nowhere to be found.

Later the same day, the criminal journalist has an interview set up with a wife murderer on death row. He was a criminology professor, who killed his wife and mutilated her corpse. He now helped solve cases behind bars while awaiting his death date. The journalist asks for his advice on her missing friend case and the story unfolds.

It is a fast pace show with twists and turns that kept me engaged. It felt like the whole point of the show is to prove that everyone can be a murderer. They convinced me. I was rooting for the vicar’s family to get out of this situation unharmed. I didn’t like how they kept pointing out that the kidnaped woman is so clever. Let me decide, you don’t have to say it again and again. The wife murderer helps with two other cases, which I didn’t find as fascinating. The trailer for season 2 looks great, I am interested to know more about the wife murderer’s case.

The show is based on a true story, maybe that is why it was so boring. It has 7 episodes but it could have easily been an hour movie. The story is about this overpriced house in New Jersey, which everyone falls in love at first sight. People are going bankrupt, killing animals, sending threatening letters, and making up ghost stories; just to get this house. A person has been trying to scare every new buyer of the house for years through threatening letters. They call themselves ‘The Watcher’ and the whole show is about finding this person. But in the end, there is not even a single suspect that you can rule off the list, except the two who died of cancer. The show is so pointless and unreal, and the characters look so animated and unrelatable.

Thanks for reading!

Comments

  1. Hairstyles

    Simply desire to say your article is as astonishing. The clarity in your submit is simply cool and that i can assume you’re knowledgeable on this subject. Fine together with your permission let me to take hold of your RSS feed to stay updated with approaching post. Thanks a million and please keep up the rewarding work.

Leave a Reply