Harlan Coben has written about 40 novels over his 30-year career, which is why it seems that there’s an endless well of material that he’s been able to adapt under his deal with Netflix. One of the reasons why his shows are popular is that they’re solid thrillers, with interesting setups and lots of twists and turns. The big variable seems to be the characters in the thrillers themselves; sometimes they’re interesting, and other times not so much. That’s the issue we have with the Polish adaptation of Coben’s 2004 novel Just One Look.
JUST ONE LOOK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A man walks up to the door of a prison and buzzes to be let in.
The Gist: Borys Gajewicz (Miroslaw Zbrojewicz), a prosecutor, is meeting with the man who killed his daughter Alex years ago. Apparently, the man is dying and wants to finally tell Borys who hired him to kill her. But he wants Borys to do something for him first.
Greta Rembiewska (Maria Debska) continues to have nightmares about a fire at a music club 15 years prior. She was the only survivor found in the rubble of the club. The nightmare tends to start, though, with her watching the band up on stage, with the lead singer, Jimmy D. (Pitor Stramowski), dedicating a song to her.
Now, though, she’s happily married to Jacek Lawniczak (Cezary Lukazewicz), and they have two kids. While on vacation, the two of them start to make love in an RV while the kids are playing on the beach, revealing Greta’s extensive scarring from the burns she suffered.
Back at home, she gets flowers from a benefactor named Karol Wespa (Andrzej Zelinski), who always sends her flowers on the anniversary of the fire. When he calls, she bluntly but politely tells her that the flowers need to stop; she’s moved on in her life and the flowers are too strong of a reminder of that horrific day.
Greta gets some photos of the family vacation from a local camera shop, but hidden in the stack is a smaller photo of people she doesn’t recognize, except for a man who looks a lot like Jacek. It’s evident that the photo is from the time before she knew him. One of the other faces in the photo is crossed out in red.
When she shows Jacek the photo, he mysteriously takes the photo when Greta’s distracted and leaves; he doesn’t come back overnight. While we see him being followed, Greta tries to find out just who is in that picture, asking her friend Kamila Sosnik (Marta Malikowska) for some help.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Pick a Netflix adaptation of a Harlan Coben novel and this will have the same vibe. We’ll give you the last two we reviewed: Fool Me Once and Missing You.
Our Take: At this point in the Harlan Coben/Netflix relationship, the thrillers that are based on his novels have been reliably twisty, even if sometimes the characters that are in them are a little flat. Just One Look is no exception. As we see in the first episode, the thing that comes in and upsets the main character’s seemingly bucolic life is a photo, but it could have been a person in her past or an article in the paper or, well, just about anything.
Coben’s novels are adept at finding different scenarios that turn their protagonists’ lives upside down. Adaptations like Just One Look take advantage of that, but what the series sometimes lack are characters that have anything resembling a backstory or personality. Here we have a woman who is defined by the tragedy she barely survived, a husband who is basically a stand-in for happiness, and a prosecutor who is determined to find who killed his daughter. At some point, the stories will combine and become a twisty knot of lies and coverups.
But is it a story we care about? If the characters in the story are not very deep, will the machinations of the thriller carry us through the six episodes? We’re not sure.
Sex and Skin: We mentioned the scene that shows Greta’s burn scars. There’s also a scene where Kamila voyeuristically watches the woman next door have sex with her husband — and it seems that the neighbor has her curtains open on purpose.
Parting Shot: A flashback to Greta in the hospital after the fire, with Jimmy threatening her if she reveals any information about what happened.
Sleeper Star: We’re curious to know what Pitor Stramowski’s character Jimmy’s role is in all of this, as we see him during the current day, sitting up when he sees Greta’s Facebook post about Jacek being missing.
Most Pilot-y Line: The scene we described above, where Kamila gets off watching her neighbors have sex, left us scratching our heads. We were literally just introduced to her in the previous scene, so we’re not sure what her voyeurism has to do with the rest of the story.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Like most Harlan Coben thrillers on Netflix, Just One Look has enough twists and turns to keep viewers on the hook, especially given the fact that the total running time of the series is probably around four hours. Is it the most riveting story of the bunch? No, and that’s likely because the characters aren’t all that interesting.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Just One Look’ On Netflix, A Polish Harlan Coben Thriller About A Woman Finding Out Secrets From Her Husband’s Past appeared first on Decider.
