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#‘Sweetpea’ Review: Ella Purnell Is in Full Control of Starz’s Deliciously Queasy Serial Killer Thriller

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It’s not often I find myself wondering if someone’s life could’ve actually been improved by spending time among the cannibalistic girl gangs of Yellowjackets.

But Sweetpea protagonist Rhiannon Lewis, played by none other than Yellowjackets alum Ella Purnell, might be a rare exception. Maybe then, she would have had the chance to confront her teenage angst head-on, rather than letting it metastasize to the point that serial killing starts to seem like the only release valve potent enough for her all-consuming rage.

Sweetpea

The Bottom Line

Intriguingly murky.

Airdate: 12:00 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 10 (Starz app); 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 11 (Starz)
Cast: Ella Purnell, Nicôle Lecky, Calam Lynch, Leah Harvey, Jon Pointing, Dustin Demri-Burns, Jeremy Swift
Creator: Kirstie Swain, based on the novel by C.J. Skuse

In Rhiannon’s defense, the Starz drama does make it look fun — to a point. Her path of destruction often plays as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for anyone who’s ever dreamt of getting back at a childhood tormenter, a rude stranger, an obnoxious co-worker. (Note to my THR colleagues: Not any of you, I promise.) But what makes the British series more unsettling and ultimately more compelling is its willingness to sit in the murky middle ground separating vengeance and cruelty, victim and perpetrator.

At 26, Rhiannon spends her days as a low-level assistant to a small-town newspaper editor (Ted Lasso’s Jeremy Swift) who all but laughs her out of the room when she asks for a promotion. In her downtime, she texts a former hookup (Jon Pointing) who can barely be bothered to shoot back an emoji in response.

Eternally overlooked and underappreciated, Rhiannon traces her current troubles back to her adolescence, when a mean-girl classmate, Julia (Nicôle Lecky), drove her to anxiety-induced trichotillomania (the compulsive pulling out of her own hair), humiliated her before their peers and generally destroyed her self-worth. It seems little wonder that her darkly funny internal monologues so often take the form of an Arya Stark-ian list of “people I’d love to kill.”

Among the few bright spots in Rhiannon’s life are her adoring Chihuahua, Tink, and the ailing father, Tommy (David Bark-Jones), she cares for in her childhood home. But after one particularly brutal day in the hourlong premiere, she finally hits back at a universe that can’t seem to stop dealing her crushing blows. While her first act of violence is born of self-defense, it unlocks something in her. For the first time in God knows how long, the former wallflower walks away from the encounter with a spring in her step and her head held high.

But are we watching the triumphant rise of an underdog, or the origin story of a monster? Rhiannon insists, explicitly and repeatedly, that it’s the former. Her show is less certain.

From the start, creator Kirstie Swain (adapting a novel by C.J. Skuse) sprinkles seeds of doubt around Rhiannon’s self-serving perspective. Is it really Julia’s fault, for instance, if Rhiannon suffers a tragic accident because she’s so enraged by the sight of a billboard for Julia’s real-estate business? Does Rhiannon actually go ignored by everyone, or does she just brush off the people — like her cute new co-worker, AJ (Calam Lynch) — who do notice and express genuine interest in her?

This approach has its limits. Even as the series purposefully blurs the lines between abuser and abused, it’s not above reaching for trauma as a shortcut to generating compassion — which in turn can make some supporting characters feel more like thought experiments than full-fledged humans in their own right.

Mostly, though, the moral ambiguity is part of the wicked thrill. For the perpetually put-upon Rhiannon, victimhood and villainy are two sides of the same coin. Like Joe from You, she’s all the more dangerous for how effectively she squeezes herself into a sympathetic archetype.

Purnell — who between this, Fallout and the aforementioned Yellowjackets has recently thrived in macabre milieus — embodies her character’s many contradictions with ease. The innocent vulnerability suggested by her doe-like eyes is belied by the private smirks she allows herself after doling out her twisted brand of justice. Jo Thompson’s costumes further tone down the actor’s naturally striking looks until she really does seem to fade into the background. At one point, a stranger mistakes her crouched, rain slicker-clad form for a garbage bag. Enraging as the ordeal is for her, you can hardly blame him.

What’s going to happen next in Sweetpea is rarely all that difficult to guess; more than once I found myself waiting for characters to arrive at choices or epiphanies telegraphed episodes before. What I hoped to see happen, on the other hand, I found more challenging to say — particularly in the second half of the six-part season, which brings to the forefront a detective, Marina (Leah Harvey), whose obsessive vendetta against Rhiannon is rooted more in their similarities than their differences.

If there’s a downside to the show’s embrace of ambivalence, it’s that it’s harder to feel fully satisfied when you weren’t entirely certain what you hoped for to begin with. Fortunately, Sweetpea declines to make us decide, serving up an open-ended finale that suggests many more bloody twists to come. Wherever she takes us next, I’ll be watching the girl who once insisted she was invisible to the world.

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