From November 14th on Prime Video, all 6 episodes of Malice – Keep your enemies close, a thriller series (hopefully only one season) created by the English screenwriter James Wood and starring the English comedian and actor Jack Whitehall and the legendary interpreter of The X Files (and then of Californication), the American David Duchovny, will be available.

Usually British thriller series, even more so British thriller miniseries, have a special place in our hearts and memories. And Malice also, in part, favorably impressed us, even if our overall opinion is negatively influenced by an ending that we won’t spoil for you, but which in our opinion makes this series a partial disappointment. Here is the plot and our opinion on Malice, of which we report the official trailer in Italian at the end of the review.

What Malice is about – Keep your enemies close

At the beginning of the series we see a young man (Whitehall) stopped at a customs check when he lands in the United States, during which he is asked if he knows Jamie Tanner, who met a bad end.

At this point we go back in time a few months, to summer 2024, and move to the Greek island of Paros.
Here Jamie Tanner (Duchovny), an American venture capitalist who lives in London, is spending his holidays in his luxurious villa together with his second wife Nat (Carice van Houten), his teenage children Keir and April and little Dexter, accompanied by a young nanny who is not particularly passionate about his work.

To spend the holidays with them, Nat’s friend Jules (Christine Adams), her husband Damien (Raza Jaffrey) and their daughters, with their guardian or “tata” (manny in English, a play on words between man, man, and nanny, nanny, which fans of This is us already remember) Adam, the very young man seen at the beginning.

Adam is a boy with a considerable cultural and aesthetic background, but it is immediately clear that he is hiding something (even without having seen the trailer). And the suspicions are confirmed shortly after, when he throws Jamie’s passport into the sea. But this is only the first of a series, in every sense, of increasingly evil and dangerous actions against Jamie, carried out according to a precise and mysterious plan of revenge.

Either it’s a short miniseries or next season will be meaningless: because Malice didn’t convince us

This year, several single-season thriller series were released on Prime Video that we really liked: Wrong Sisters or, to stay in the United Kingdom, The Girlfriend and Lazarus. Of all these we appreciated the ending and the way in which the cases/mysteries were resolved and concluded.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Malice. Indeed, while watching the sixth and final episode, we checked several times how much time was left until the end, until we resigned ourselves to a conclusion that, predictably, left us quite disappointed.

A real shame considering the amount of clues, stories, details and above all actions that accumulate episode after episode. However, the great expectations are not rewarded at all, neither from the point of view of the explanations nor even with regards to the motivations of the protagonist.

So much so that at a certain point, after making sure that there were no other episodes, we began to doubt whether this inconclusive ending could be a way to create anticipation for a second season. An eventuality which, given how this season ends, would make little sense for multiple reasons, and would rather have the effect of increasing regrets for having seen the first one, which only lacks half an episode of explanations to end the story.

A possible waste of time that we can recommend to the most die-hard fans of the great Duchovny, who at 65 has not lost a iota of his charm and erotic charisma, here excellently supported by the stupendous Van Houten, who had literally bewitched us with his Melisandre in Game of Thrones. In the midst of so much sensuality, the handsome and usually funny Whitehall plays the part of Manzoni’s earthenware vase between two iron vases. And it wouldn’t be a problem anyway if Malice ended with an ending worthy of the name.

Rating: 5.7