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4 days ago
14
You wear a tightly belted beige trenchcoat and you live in a cavernous show-home bedecked with mid-century pine and fashionably inadequate lighting. You are French. You have two uncommonly beautiful teenage children and are preparing to return to your prestigious role at a maison de couture after the recent birth of your uncommonly beautiful baby. But mon Dieu, you are anxious! You fear your glamorous workload will interfere with your ability to care for l’enfant. The solution? You will hire an enigmatic au pair. Alas, you have never watched television and are thus unaware that this will expose faultlines in your marriage and lead to a series of increasingly terrifying events that will threaten the very fabric of your existence. You are Paula (Mélanie Doutey), the protagonist of four-part French thriller The Intruder, and you are, ’ow you say, stuffed.
To France, then, where Paula and Jérôme, her bearded shrug of a husband (Éric Caravaca), are poised to tick off the first point on their “TV Thriller That Begins with the Ill-Advised Hiring of an Enigmatic Au Pair” checklist. To wit: the interviewing of a childminder who appears – and at this point you may wish to ready the nearest defibrillator – almost too good to be true. Enter Tess (Lucie Fagedet), who doesn’t blink but does have the ability to make baby Orso gurgle with glee, so is hired on the spot. But what is this? Within hours of her arrival Tess is tip-toeing around the family’s bewilderingly dark house, staring at Orso’s toys and pawing Jérôme’s shirts.
She is also making clandestine calls to an unnamed woman, who has agreed to pose as Tess’s former employer should Paula get in touch, but is nevertheless narked with the ruse. “The principal at the college said you can’t just disappear like that,” she hisses. Tess is unperturbed. “Calm down,” she whispers. “Just say what I told you. Tell Paula I’m … [a pause, here, while the soundtrack’s hysterical string section gulps and clenches its bum cheeks] … nice.” Who is this expressionless interloper? Could she be harbouring a secret agenda that involves a) exploiting Paula’s postpartum fragility, b) gathering evidence of an apparent affair with her carefully dishevelled neighbour (Clément Sibony) and c) framing Paula for murder?
The awfulness mounts. Or at least, we assume it does. So fashionably inadequate is the lighting in the family’s wow-house that it is at times almost impossible to make out what is going on. I spend most of the first episode squinting into the Stygian depths of my laptop, nose flattened against the screen like a smear of pâté on the windshield of a Peugeot.
Anyway. Amid the gloom, the following semi-perceptible bad stuff happens: Paula’s favourite jacket goes missing. And things have been moved around in Paula’s office.
Alack, her family are too dazzled by Tess’s veal marengo to notice that the newcomer is undermining Paula at every turn. “Is she a cousin of Mary Poppins?” swoons the son, Basile (Zaccharie Heintz). “Let’s get a selfie with our great new au pair!” giggles the daughter, Camille (Hélie-Rose Dalmay).
Naturally, being the main character in a poorly realised thriller, only Paula is aware of any unpleasantness. “I am,” she tells Jérôme, “uncomfortable with her.” “Maybe,” he replies slowly, “Tess isn’t the problem.” “So,” gasps Paula, “you’re saying I am the problem?” “Yes,” he responds, nodding his bearded French head sadly. “She is wonderful.”
It feels important at this juncture to point out that there are three more episodes of this still to come.
If The Intruder feels desperately familiar, it’s because there have been variations on the “murderous au pair” theme for as long as viewers have possessed the ability to roll their eyes. Indeed, there was a version earlier this year in the form of Channel 5’s The Au Pair, in which a homicidal nanny with a secret agenda inveigled her way into blah blah and David Suchet was horrified to find himself in chinos.
It was terrible, but at least you could actually see how terrible it was. Here, we must squint through the cliches and grope our way through scenes of such underlit obviousness, it barely feels worth the energy of laughing at the stupidity of it all. If there is a dafter thriller in 2025 I will eat mon béret.
