the tourist review jamie dornan

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The Tourist review – Jamie Dornan is intense in explosively entertaining outback thriller

An Irishman wakes up in Australia with amnesia in this pulse-pounding series packed with humour and philosophical questions

F anging it down an outback road when he is rammed by a truck driver from hell, Jamie Dornan experiences a terrible accident that gives him amnesia – making him forget about all that bondage paraphernalia from Fifty Shades of Grey .

In the explosively entertaining six-part series The Tourist, created and written by Harry and Jack Williams, the Irish actor and former Hugo Boss and Calvin Klein studmuffin plays a louche loner who can’t remember who is he, what he is doing in Australia or why he appears to have “kill me” stamped figuratively speaking across his forehead.

Dornan joins a coterie of famous foreign actors who have been plonked in the thick of arid, unforgiving Australian land and left to fry in the sun for our dramatic amusement. See also: Gary Bond in Wake in Fright , who drank a lot of beer and went mad; Dennis Hopper in Mad Dog Morgan , who drank a lot of moonshine and went mad; Johnathon Schaech in Welcome to Woop Woop , who spent a lot of time with the locals and went mad; and soon to be Zac Efron in Gold, who, the trailer suggests, finds gold in them thar desert and then goes mad.

Come to think of it, Dornan’s character in The Tourist – billed as “The Man” – is pretty sane compared with these rather rabid fellows. He’s like Guy Pearce in Memento in that he’s determined but displaced (in this instance geographically as well as mentally) and constantly banging against the walls of his own mind. If the whole being rammed into near-oblivion wasn’t enough, “The Man” is also a mite concerned when, after meeting the friendly and charming Luci (Shalom Brune-Franklin) at a diner, there appears to be another (rather spectacular) attempt on his life.

The show’s central mystery has something to do with a man who has been buried alive and calls “The Man” from inside a barrel, begging to be found post-haste. Director Chris Sweeney (who helmed episodes one to three, with Daniel Nettheim steering the others) shoves a camera inside a tight coffin-esque space, evoking memories of Ryan Reynolds in Buried.

A big, beefy, cowboy shirt-wearing villain emerges in Billy (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), who whistles cheerfully but with absolute menace, his merry tune a harbinger of impending doom. In the series’ second half, Alex Dimitriades emerges as another prominent bad guy, hamming it up in super-villain style.

Certain characters aren’t who they say they are, though that does not apply to Helen Chambers – a fair dinkum what-you-see-is-what-you-get probationary constable battling with low self-esteem. She is superbly portrayed by Danielle Macdonald (who played the gossip columnist Lillian Roxon in I am Woman ), bringing loads of colour and detail to what could have been the simple sweet hick. Macdonald’s performance vividly contrasts with the rough and tough Dornan – also perfect in a high-intensity role as a man who is something of a blank slate, frightened by who he is or who he may be. There are philosophical questions about identity to ponder – if viewers pause for a breather and stop chewing their nails – including to what extent each of us are defined by our past actions.

There’s also an oddly good performance from the ever-reliable Damon Herriman, offsetting his recent menacing work by playing a detective inspector in a way that’s both funny weird and funny ha-ha, suiting the show’s quite dry approach to comedy. Many scenes are humorous in a cagey way, sans explicit signposting: at one point for instance we discover a traffic pile-up has been created by two turtles rooting in the middle of the road. Elsewhere, in the aftermath of an intense confrontation, in a shot one could imagine belonging to a Coen brothers movie, the show cuts to a framed picture on a wall bearing the following message: “LIFE IS MADE OF CHOICES. WIPE YOUR FEET OR SCRUB THE FLOOR.”

The Tourist is very well shot by Ben Wheeler and Geoffrey Hall (who was also the cinematographer for Chopper , Red Dog: True Blue and Eden ), with colour grading that’s a little off, a little sickly, as if the blues and greens (hard to find in arid outback) in particular have been poisoned from the inside. This is a clever way of visualising the feeling that something isn’t quite right. Sweeney and Nettheim (whose directorial work includes episodes of Halifax: Retribution , Tidelands and Line of Duty) establish a cracker pace that creeps, creeps, creeps up on you, then explodes with a great big thunderclap of action then creeps, creeps, creeps up again.

The “bugger me dead, it’s hot!” action-thriller, as it shall henceforth be known, is by now very familiar, but The Tourist is different: a pulse-pounder that feels fresh despite many genre elements, particularly of the neo-noir variety. The show has a great forwards and backwards momentum, contrasting cliffhanger moments with questions about the past and the ambiguities therein. It’s a vision of Australiana that’s less “ where the bloody hell are you? ” than who the bloody hell are you, and what the bloody hell will happen next? And – summarising my personal response – bloody hell, this is good.

• Australian television
• Jamie Dornan

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'The Tourist' doesn't know who he is — just that someone wants him dead

John Powers

In The Tourist, "The Man" (Jamie Dornan) wakes up in a small town hospital in the Australian outback with no idea who he is or how he got there. HBO hide caption

In The Tourist, "The Man" (Jamie Dornan) wakes up in a small town hospital in the Australian outback with no idea who he is or how he got there.

Ever since the birth of mass communications, our culture has been haunted by the idea of amnesia. In high-class books by the likes of George Orwell or Milan Kundera , forgetting becomes a political metaphor for the erasure of truth. Things are less ambitious in pop entertainments like Memento or the Jason Bourne series . There, memory-loss is less a metaphor than a motor — a gimmick to drive the story forward.

This motor purrs like a Ferrari in The Tourist , a hit BBC series playing on HBO Max. Written by the Williams brothers, Harry and Jack — best known here for The Missing and Baptiste — this funny, suspenseful six-part thriller doesn't merely keep us guessing. It keeps its amnesiac hero guessing, too. He knows even less about his own story than we do.

A bearded, muscled-up Jamie Dornan stars as a T-shirt clad Irishman who gets in a car accident and winds up in a small town hospital in the Australian outback. Known simply as "The Man," he doesn't know who he is or how he got there. But soon after he leaves the hospital, he knows one thing for sure: Somebody wants to kill him.

As he seeks to find out who's after him and why, he's helped by two very different women. Luci (Shalom Brune-Franklin) is a waitress who we aren't quite sure what to make of. In contrast, it's easy to trust probationary constable Helen Chambers, played by Danielle Macdonald. Helen's a newbie cop who struggles with her weight and with a fiancé who speaks of her appearance with such passive-aggressive meanness that I kept hoping he'd become one of the show's murder victims.

While The Man's search for his identity is grippingly plotted, the show lets the action breathe. It takes time to enjoy his encounters with a wide range of oddball types, be it a goofy chess-playing pilot, a Greek mobster, the affably nutty woman who offers him lodging, or the enormous, cowboy-hatted hitman who has the self-satisfied theatricality of an escapee from a Tarantino movie. That said, The Man knows he must keep moving to stay alive.

For all The Tourist 's inventiveness — Episode 5 is a trip — it reminds us that even good pop culture is often derivative. The show's opening car crash sequence mimics the Steven Spielberg movie Duel . More importantly, the Williams brothers are pretty clearly doing a Down Under riff on Fargo . Their series offers the same blend of violence and barbed humor, the same mythologizing of bleak, underpopulated places, and the same cavalcade of viciousness and folly that brings out the heroism in an ordinary person.

The show's moral center is Helen, who, in Macdonald's sensational performance, has our sympathy from the get-go. Her work is so scene-stealingly good that I would call this a career-making performance if I hadn't already said this about Macdonald's electric work as an aspiring New Jersey rapper in the indie film Patti Cake$ .

Helen's transparent goodness makes her the perfect counterpoint to The Man, a handsome hunk who's a mystery, even to himself. It's a great role for Dornan, who, earlier in his career, had a slightly synthetic prettiness that made him ideal for creepy characters like the S&M billionaire in Fifty Shades of Grey . Here, he's a bit older, thicker, and rougher. And just as Brad Pitt often seems liberated when his good looks are masked a bit, Dornan gives his best performance as a man who isn't sure whether or not he's the hero of his own life.

Over the course of the six episodes, The Man struggles to learn whether, back before his accident, he was a good guy or a bad guy. And if he had been a villain, does he have to stay one, even after he starts remembering his past? I won't reveal what he discovers, though I feel obligated to say that you won't get a definitive answer this season. You'll have to watch Season 2 of The Tourist , not yet made, which I bet you will be more than happy to do.

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the tourist.

HBO Max continues stealth drops of some of the best drama mini-series on television. Last year highlights included “The Head” and “ Station Eleven ,” and they start 2022 strongly with the fantastic “The Tourist,” a twisty tale that plays like an Aussie version of “ Fargo .” With sharp dialogue, clever plotting, and career-best work from Jamie Dornan and Danielle Macdonald , this is a great little thriller, a show that constantly keeps you guessing and entertained in equal measure.

The “ Belfast ” and “ Fifty Shades of Grey ” star plays an unnamed man (at least for a while) who is driving through the very remote Australian outback. He stops at a station to use the bathroom, banters with the guy behind the counter, and hits the road again. Looking in the rearview mirror, he sees a truck gaining on him with remarkable speed. The Man twists off the road to avoid it and the trucker follows, revealing through a POV from his cab that this is very intentional—he’s trying to kill this tourist. They race through the desert until The Man’s car crashes. He wakes up in a hospital with no memory of who he is or how he got there.

Enter a small-town officer named Helen Chambers (Macdonald), engaged to an awful man named Ethan ( Greg Larsen ) and thrust into a mystery about who this handsome Irishman is in a hospital bed. When The Man finds a note with a time and a location in his pocket, he heads to a small town called Burnt Ridge, where he meets a woman named Luci ( Shalom Brune-Franklin ) who might know about his past, ends up crossing paths with a sociopath ( Ólafur Darri Ólafsson ) who clearly wants him dead, and gets a phone call from a man who’s been buried underground. And then things get even weirder.

Created by the people behind the excellent “ The Missing ” (which aired stateside on Starz), the writing on “The Tourist” is a metronomic back and forth between reveals and how those reveals propel the narrative in a new direction. Pushing their way through all the chaos are Dornan and Macdonald, both phenomenal. Dornan finds a quirky, unsettled way to play a man who doesn’t know who he is without resorting to the cliché of the lost soul. If anything, he leans into more of a blank slate interpretation of amnesia, playing a guy who’s more open to what comes next because he can’t remember what came before. And Macdonald is charming and so incredibly likable that she becomes the heart of a show that can be cold at times.

Echoes of “ Memento ” and “Fargo” aside, “The Tourist” also has its own quirky personality. Some of those quirks get a bit extreme in late-season episodes in ways I can’t spoil, but the show is never boring. It’s a reminder that the Dornan who was so great in “ The Fall ” is still out there, and I hope it leads him to more bizarre, challenging roles like this one. There’s an argument to be made that there’s an even-better 100-minute movie in this six-episode mini-series, but that’s not the world we’re in right now. A story like this has a better chance to be told in the TV system than the mid-budget film one, and the writers don’t drag their feet or spin their wheels like so many streaming thrillers. They’re constantly moving our hero forward, keeping us uncertain about his past and even his moral center.

Some will argue that “The Tourist” gets too convoluted and I’ll admit that I enjoyed the playful uncertainty of the first half of the season more than the intensity of the second half. Although the show does get deeper in how it unpacks lies we tell ourselves and those we listen to from other people. It turns out that everyone on "The Tourist" has a secret or two, and almost all of them could use a car accident to reset the hole they've dug for themselves. 

I'm not sure how intentional it is but the show never stopped reminding me of some of my favorite early Coen films—the noir danger of “ Blood Simple ,” the open roads of “ Raising Arizona ” (and a bearded hunter who seems unkillable), Macdonald’s very Marge Gunderson character—and yet these nods to greats are embedded in a breakneck plot that never slows down enough to distract from its own inspired storytelling. Take the trip.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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The Tourist (2022)

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Jamie Dornan as The Man

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Jamie dornan in hbo max’s ‘the tourist’: tv review.

The actor plays an amnesiac in a deadly race to figure out his identity in this six-hour slice of Australian pulp fiction.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

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Content bloat on cable and streaming is such an apparently incurable epidemic that even shows that play as lean and mean genre exercises are stuck oozing outside of their deserved boundaries — as if once there’s no marketplace for an idea to be conveyed at 90 minutes, might as well just go forever.

Something like Netflix’s True Story , which would have been an arthouse hit as a brisk John Dahl-directed theatrical thriller, instead became an instantly forgotten Netflix series, because that’s how it could get produced. Significantly better on every level, but still in need of a robust trim, is HBO Max ‘s The Tourist . Ideally, this would have been an Outback-set B-movie probably helmed by somebody like Phillip Noyce. Instead, it arrives on streaming as a six-hour drama replete with illogical misdirects, a second half that’s far less engaging than the first and a disappointing assortment of false conclusions.

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Airdate: Thursday, March 3 (HBO Max)

Cast: Jamie Dornan, Danielle Macdonald, Shalom Brune-Franklin, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson

Creators: Harry and Jack Williams

A story like this should be told without an ounce of fat. Yet even with its occasional excesses, The Tourist is a mostly taut, pretension-lite mystery with a vivid setting, a few surprises and a great trio of lead performances from Jamie Dornan , Danielle Macdonald and Shalom Brune-Franklin.

Created by Harry and Jack Williams and directed half by Chris Sweeney and half by Daniel Nettheim, The Tourist begins with what will prove to be its best set-piece, which isn’t always a great idea but in this case serves to get viewers well and truly hooked.

In a remote corner of rural Australia, a man (Dornan) with an Irish accent and no name stops for gas and a bathroom before resuming his drive. Before you can say “Hey, that’s the plot of Duel !” a truck emerges on the horizon, approaches the man’s car and tries to run it off the road. An intense pursuit ensues, all within the first 10 minutes, climaxing in the man waking up in a hospital with complete amnesia. Shot with acrid, epic scope by Ben Wheeler and edited without relief by Emma Oxley, it’s a sequence that is unique despite its familiar elements — one that’s so good that you probably won’t be offended by how little sense it makes once the show puts all of its cards on the table.

The Man doesn’t remember his name, his profession or why he was driving alone in a beat-up car on a stretch of road connecting nowhere to nowhere else, but his presence draws immediate attention. Offering benign curiosity is Probationary Constable Helen Chambers (Macdonald), trying to make a transition to legitimate policing after tiring of menial duties as a traffic cop. Offering more menacing curiosity is Billy Nixon (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), a hulking figure with a bushy beard, a rumbling voice, a questionable American accent and a blood-red cowboy hat. And it’s hard to read the intentions of diner waitress Luci (Brune-Franklin), who may be attracted to The Man because of his resemblance to Jamie Dornan, or else she has ulterior motives.

For the first few episodes, The Tourist is wonderfully spare. A couple of secondary characters pass in and out, but the story is mostly The Man, Helen, Luci and Billy, any one of whom could be a threat to the others. As the Williams brothers open the story up, it invariably becomes less interesting and more reliant on heaping doses of exposition. We meet characters including an odd detective played by Damon Herriman and some unsavory Greek gangsters. All of the characters are in the middle of their own identity crises, and while The Man is the only one who literally doesn’t know who he is, each person here is pondering existential questions about whether people can change; whether that change is a matter of personal choice; and whether it’s as simple as forging a passport or moving to a new country or making up different origin stories involving your mother or father.

From the too-clever-by-half backwards storytelling of Rellik to the structural mendacity of Liar , the Williams brothers are good at high-concept thrillers driven by tricky plot mechanics, and this fits that category more than other Two Brothers Pictures creations like the tormented The Missing . The more gaps in The Man’s story they expose, the more interesting The Tourist is; the more those gaps get filled in, the less interesting the resulting shape of the puzzle feels.

None of the answers is exactly infuriating and some of them play very well in the moment — the fifth episode is a straight-up backstory dump, but the creators find a way to make it amusing — but the more distance you get from the full story, the more you may find that very little holds together. It’s possible to concentrate on the occasional shootouts, a flimsy-but-taut storyline lifted from the Ryan Reynolds movie Buried and one stunning outback vista after another, and still be limitedly bothered by lapses in common sense.

It helps that this is probably the funniest of the Williams brothers thrillers, a reminder that as producers their credits also include the very fine Back to Life and the spectacular Fleabag . If you think the plot strains credulity, so do many of the characters, and there are crackling exchanges of dialogue, silly pieces of flirtation and enough quirky and outsized figures to make it clear that if Duel was the series’ table-setting inspiration, most of what follows is basically Fargo with a greater risk of kangaroos.

Dornan is probably too hunky to be inherently ideal as the Hitchcockian Everyman, but The Man is a savvy encapsulation of Dornan’s varied skills, especially those he’s been showcasing in his projects from the past year-ish. He has compelling chemistry with both Macdonald and Brune-Franklin, he’s generally convincing as a sturdy action lead and he has an underlying menace that lets you wonder if the man that The Man used to be might not be so virtuous. Best of all — and this will not shock the Barb and Star hive — Dornan is an adroit comic performer, whether it’s expressing Irish-accented confusion about a fluffy stuffed koala or any of the bickering that characterizes The Man’s relationships with Helen and Luci. He weathers all of the reveals about his character, up to the finale’s conclusive twists. It’s just a darned good performance in a show that hinges on its lead.

Macdonald is, at some points, nearly a co-lead and the Patti Cake$ star brings nervous humor and the real emotional hook to the story, maintaining the character’s integrity in the face of a sometimes sweet, mostly unappealing engagement to Greg Larsen’s brutally passive-aggressive Ethan. I wish somebody had written more actual traits for Brune-Franklin’s Luci, but the simmering interactions with Dornan keep the show going through its slower parts. Herriman’s guessing-game strangeness and Ólafsson’s garrulous intimidation are responsible for the show’s most Coen Brothers-y elements.

At six hours, The Tourist ‘s focus wavers, but its momentum remains solid; in a spring of self-important ripped-from-headlines TV storytelling, I appreciated its pulpy drive. And that “Shouldn’t this be a couple of hours shorter?” sensation? Well, I guess that’s just a permanent condition.

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Jamie Dornan makes for a compelling guide through The Tourist , a beguiling drama that deepens its mystery with solid shocks and welcome moments of levity.

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The Tourist

When a man wakes up in the Australian outback with no memory, he must use the few clues he has to discover his identity before his past catches up with him. When a man wakes up in the Australian outback with no memory, he must use the few clues he has to discover his identity before his past catches up with him. When a man wakes up in the Australian outback with no memory, he must use the few clues he has to discover his identity before his past catches up with him.

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The Tourist season two review: Jamie Dornan is back in one of the best British thrillers of recent years

Some of the tension is lost in this second run, which relocates the action to ireland, but it’s a worthwhile return for dornan’s enigmatic hero, article bookmarked.

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The man with no name, no family, no history, is an action movie staple. It evokes memories of Clint Eastwood staring down his enemies in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly , or Viggo Mortensen growling through the apocalyptic wasteland of The Road . It is a sure-fire route to a sense of mystery – who is he? What’s he doing here? – but it’s also a creative dead end. You cannot tantalise your viewers forever, and that’s the challenge for the second series of BBC One’s The Tourist , which picks up after the pieces begin to fall into place for our enigmatic hero.

After the ambiguous final moments of The Tourist ’s first season , viewers will be relieved to discover that Elliot ( Jamie Dornan ) is very much alive. In fact, he’s swanning around south Asia with his girlfriend Helen (Danielle Macdonald), who has sacked off her career as a police constable. After a difficult time in Australia (which involved a car crash, loss of memory, and about a dozen attempts on his life), Elliot thinks he’s safe. “Are you really, really – like 100 per cent – sure about that?” Helen asks. Well, of course not. And it takes about five minutes back in his Irish homeland before Elliot is kidnapped by masked goons.

If the first series was a fish-out-of-water thriller, calling to mind Robert A Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land , this second outing inverts the formula. If there is a tourist now, it’s Helen. For Elliot, this is a return to a native land where people know who he is – or, at least, who he was. “You sound like you’re a long way from home,” a local barkeep tells Helen. “Yeah,” she replies, “I am.” But where the show previously had to rely on the, rather tired, amnesiac trope in order to make Elliot’s discombobulation satisfying, Helen is a more natural tourist. She gallivants around the Irish countryside while Elliot tries to break free of his captors (who needle him with Saw -inspired challenges, such as cutting off his own legs, but played for laughs).

The Tourist has afforded an opportunity for Dornan to show exactly how woefully miscast he was as the icy, dominant Christian in the Fifty Shades franchise. Behind the good looks that saw him model for Calvin Klein in his early years, Dornan is better at projecting vulnerability than confidence. It’s what made his serial killer, Paul Spector, so chilling in The Fall : a cold-blooded killer gripped by a disarming unease with his place in the world. In The Tourist he is neither action hero nor lothario, just a man caught up in events like driftwood floating down the Lagan. “I tried once to end it all,” he tells one of his kidnappers. “But I’m ready to answer for the things that I’ve done.”

Mild-mannered men who are surprisingly au fait with violence and criminality – a genre spawned by Breaking Bad , with the baton passed first to Ozark , and now over to The Tourist – has become television’s most reliable archetype. The Tourist ’s newly expanded canvas gives more narrative control to Helen, which allows the fresh air of a more comic tone into proceedings. Searching for her kidnapped lover, she teams up with Conor MacNeill’s detective, who isn’t quite as normal a police officer as Helen was (to say the least). “I had to go and stick my big nose in it!” she exclaims, as things unravel beyond her control.

Where the original concept of The Tourist was neat and tidy – an unknown Northern Irishman wakes from a car accident in Australia, pursued by assassins whose motive eludes him – this second series is less clean. Ireland is a more familiar place than Australia (more like the Heinlein formula, where a Martian visits Earth), but the interpersonal dealings are more complex than ever. There’s an element of Hatfields and McCoys to the feud between two warring Irish crime dynasties (to one of which, Elliot may be the unwitting heir), which pushes the show away from the mystery genre (though the twists keep coming, with the regularity of a Tuscan highway) and towards the less interesting world of gangsters. In refocusing, something of the tension that typified the Antipodean season is lost.

All the same, The Tourist – which broadcasts on Stan in Australia and HBO in the US, as well as the BBC – is undoubtedly one of the best British thrillers of recent years. The combination of a very sexy protagonist, a slow-burning but believable romance (the chemistry between Dornan and Macdonald is, again, excellent), and stakes that get cranked higher and higher, make this a worthwhile second run. Now it’s no longer a blank slate – an unknown on the schedule – the show is less surprising, but The Tourist ’s return home still has the capacity to thrill.

‘The Tourist’ season two is on BBC One and BBC iPlayer at 9pm on 1 January 2024

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‘The Tourist’ Thrills, but Doesn’t Take Itself Too Seriously

Even though the six-episode series, airing on HBO Max, is gripping and full of surprises, its creators made sure to include some offbeat humor.

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By Desiree Ibekwe

LONDON — After his car is rammed off the road by a mystery driver in a truck, a Northern Irishman wakes up in a hospital in the Australian outback with no memory of who he is. “I keep telling myself to just try and remember,” he tells the police officer that comes to take his statement, “but it’s like trying to make yourself fly.”

That is the starting gun for “The Tourist,” a six-part limited series that premieres Thursday on HBO Max. After the man, played by Jamie Dornan (“ Belfast ”), leaves the hospital, it becomes clear he was involved in some murky business in his former life, and someone definitely wants him dead.

The opening premise would suggest a typical thriller. Memory loss is a familiar plot device for the genre (see: “Memento,” “The Bourne Identity” et al). “The Tourist,” which first aired on the BBC in Britain this year, is similar in form to the broadcaster’s other tense, tight shows, such as “ The Night Manager ” and “ Bodyguard .”

Unlike those offerings, “The Tourist” adds more offbeat humor and touches of the surreal to a gripping central plot that still provides car chases, shootouts and international criminal outfits.

When he first read the script, Dornan found it surprising, he said in a recent interview. “Any time I thought it was one thing, or I had a handle on where it was heading, it was altered,” he said. “It was sometimes really subtle, and sometimes it was a big whack over the head.”

As the episodes unfurl, rooting for the confused, likable character becomes a little more complicated. In a recent interview, Dornan said that when he first read the script he wondered if the audience would still be on the man’s side, “searching for the answers when they find out what some of the answers are.”

Dornan’s character is joined in his hunt for answers by the police officer from the hospital, Helen Chambers ( Danielle Macdonald ), who is on her first assignment off traffic duty. She feels strangely compelled to help the man, who also finds assistance from Luci Miller (Shalom Brune-Franklin), a waitress he meets at a cafe.

The show’s setting in small-town Australia helps provide comic relief through characters like a hapless but well-meaning rookie police officer and the elderly owners of a bed-and-breakfast. Amid the chaos and danger, there are scenes that tip into the wholesome and heartwarming.

Helen, the police officer, is also an unlikely thriller protagonist: kind, honest and unassuming. Macdonald sees her character as the show’s “Everywoman,” she said in a recent interview. When we first meet Helen, it is clear that she is unhappy and underestimated, by herself and her fiancé.

Macdonald said that she had spent some time figuring out the character’s role in the plot. “The rest of the show is so dark and Helen was so light,” she said. “It ended up balancing really nicely.”

The show’s writers and creators, the brothers Jack and Harry Williams, have become known for conventional thrillers such as the Golden Globe-nominated show “ The Missing .” “The Tourist” came from a desire to do something different. “It’s the kind of show we’d watch, it’s the kind of show we really enjoy doing,” Jack said.

The brothers also have experience with dark-hearted television comedies, having been executive producers on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “ Fleabag ” and on Daisy Haggard’s “ Back to Life .” Their latest show, then, was about “bridging that gap, because having made comedies and made drama, it just felt like a natural place for us to operate,” Harry Williams said.

They brought on Chris Sweeney, who also worked on “Back to Life,” to direct half of the series. Despite wanting to work on nondirectorial projects at the time, Sweeney said that he had been won over. “I don’t like straight thrillers, it’s not my thing, but I like things that use a device to talk about what is human existence in a playful way,” he said in a video interview.

“The Tourist” questions not only how the past defines us, but also — through the character trajectories of both the central character and of Helen — the other things we lean on to build our identities. Sweeney said that he felt the script had the “personality” of films he loves within the thriller genre, like the work of the Coen brothers. He described elements of the show as a “love letter” to those films, with scenes that evoke “ No Country for Old Men ” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight.”

Dornan was initially a little concerned about the show’s genre medley. While shooting in Australia, “the three of us, Shalom, Danielle and I, we were all in equal parts terrified at different moments because of the comedy and the drama, and how to find the comfortable line there,” he said. “I was a bit like, are people going to know what this is, or where to hang their hat on it?”

In Britain, at least, the concerns seem to have been unfounded. When “The Tourist” arrived on the BBC’s streaming service on New Year’s Day, it was met with glowing reviews and quickly became the platform’s third-most successful drama opening to date.

Jack Williams said he thought that the show had resonated with audiences, in part, because of its escapist quality, adding that it “isn’t trying to reflect back some of the angst and misery that everyone’s been experiencing for a few years.”

As well as diving into a mystery, viewers of “The Tourist” are transported to a stark, almost otherworldly landscape. The show was filmed across several different locations in the sprawling expanse of southern Australia, where you can “point the camera anywhere and it just looks incredible,” Harry Williams noted. “That said, we had to travel quite a lot of hours within the outback in order to get that desired effect,” he added.

The travel contributed to the shoot’s lasting five months, a period of filming that was also stretched by the ambition of the show: The opening car chase sequence was filmed over two weeks. “It was the hardest job I’ve ever done,” Dornan said. “It’s the longest job I’ve ever done.”

With the show’s success in Britain has come discussion about the possibility of a second season. The show was conceived as a self-contained mini-series, similar to the BBC’s other six-part shows. That “less is more” approach contrasts with the sprawling nature of much of American network television; Showtime’s thriller “Homeland,” for example, ran for eight seasons and 96 episodes.

Tommy Bulfin, a BBC drama commissioning editor, said in an email that, while the broadcaster has a “tradition of doing six episode runs,” ultimately the practice of doing shorter productions was down to the subject matter. “I think the key to the success of these shows is that they’re all excellent examples of brilliantly crafted stories,” he said.

The Williams brothers echoed that sentiment. In thinking about the length of “The Tourist,” the story took precedence. “You have to kind of follow that and the natural course that it would take and not try and squeeze out more,” Harry said. The pair wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a second season, but added that they were cautious about doing so.

“There is no perfect length, just like there’s no perfect length for a book,” Harry Williams said. “But there is an appropriate length for a story.”

Desiree Ibekwe is a news assistant on the Audio team. Before joining The Times in 2020, she was a reporter at Broadcast Magazine and completed a fellowship at The Economist.  More about Desiree Ibekwe

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Tourist’ On Netflix, Where Jamie Dornan Plays A Man Without His Memory Trying To Outrun His Past

Where to stream:.

• The Tourist

What would you do if you lost your memory? Not just what you had for breakfast, but all sense of who you are and who is in your life? Then you find out that someone really, really wants to see you dead? That’s the idea behind the new Netflix series, which originally ran on HBO Max back in 2022.

THE TOURIST : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes of the arid environment in the Australian Outback. A tiny car drives down an empty road.

The Gist: A man (Jamie Dornan) stops for gas; he’s wearing a generic “AUSTRALIA” tourist t-shirt. He has no idea why the attendant at the station makes him sign out for the bathroom key. We see him come out the back door of the bathroom, next to the Dumpsters.

As he’s driving on the seemingly empty road in his tiny Mazda, a massive tractor trailer bears down on him. When the tractor trailer rams the man’s car, he realizes it’s not just an aggressive driver. After a long chase over some rough terrain, the man thinks he’s gotten away from the truck, when the truck slams into him, causing the tiny car to roll over a few times.

The man wakes up in the local hospital, surprisingly not severely injured. However, he has no idea who he is or what he was doing. He doesn’t even remember his own name. He can recall a song title when he’s in an MRI machine, but that’s about it.

A friendly local cop, Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald), goes to his room to take a statement. She is a bit uncomfortable with the man’s lack of memory, but ends up being reassuring to an extent. The only thing he finds in his possessions is a note to meet someone the next day at a diner in a nearby town. Helen says she’ll look into that.

We follow Helen home and see that, like most of us, she has issues with her weight, not the least of which is exacerbated by her fiancé Ethan (Greg Larsen) and their upcoming wedding.

Another thing we see is someone buried underground. Desperate to get out of whatever box he’s been put in, he tries to call someone on his phone, but no one is answering.

The man goes outside to get air, but gets lost inside the hospital, scaring him senseless. He decides to check himself out of the hospital the next day, against medical advice, because he needs to go to that diner and find out just who wanted to meet him there. Helen understands why he wants to do it, and gives him a bus ticket to get there.

At the diner, he meets a waitress named Luci (Shalom Brune-Franklin), who seems to be fascinated by his amnesia. When she spills lemonade on him, she takes him out to where there are bathrooms. Just then, there’s an explosion, right in the booth where he was sitting. He wonders aloud why in the world someone is trying to kill him.

Pictures from a disposable camera found at the crash site help him retrace his steps, as well as video from the gift shop he visited. It brings him back to the gas station and its bathroom. He doesn’t find out his name though, as he signed the key sign-out sheet as “Crocodile Dundee.” But he finds something else; a stuffed koala that he hid next to the Dumpster. Much to his surprise, it starts ringing.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Take the movie  Memento and cross it with the quirkiness of the first season of the  Fargo series, and you’ve got the vibe of  The Tourist.

Our Take: The Tourist , written by Harry Williams and Jack Williams ( The Missing, Fleabag ) looks like it’s a complex show with a twisty plot, but when you really take a close look, it’s pretty straightforward. Dornan’s character has no idea who he is; all he knows is that someone wants to kill him. With the help of Helen and others, he’ll try to piece things together before those that are after him, including Billy (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), the whistling man who almost squashed him in the tractor trailer, catch up to him.

In the first episode,  The Tourist  evolves from what seems like a thriller to a more personal narrative. It’s why we get involved in Helen’s life when she’s off-duty. In a Weight Watchers-style meeting, she claims she doesn’t like her body, even though everyone is yelling about body acceptance. But it also feels like she’s more there because of her fiancé than anything else. So even though Helen knows her name, who’s in her life and what she does, she also hasn’t found herself. Plus, she seems to be made to feel guilty about just about everything.

Perhaps as she gets more involved in the life of Dornan’s character, the more she will figure out who she is. At least that’s what we hope, because Macdonald is utterly charming as Helen, who is very much in the vein of Allison Tolman’s portrayal of Molly Solverson in the aforementioned  Fargo. She’s good at her job, even if she’s a bit green, but also is a friendly and helpful sort who needs to help herself most of all.

There is definitely a bit of a sense of humor running the first episode, but the Williamses aren’t trying to make the show quippy. The humor is there when people seem to be fascinated with Dornan’s character’s amnesia, though he assures them it’s no picnic. The humor creeps in along the edges of the show, but it does just enough to ease what is a pretty serious and grim performance by Dornan.

There is one twist near the end of the episode that we won’t spoil here, but it does make us wonder if, as things get more complicated for Dornan’s character (notice we haven’t named him yet, because the character has none as yet), the plot will become more convoluted. We hope not, as it seems the straightforward manner in which this story is being told suits  The Tourist just fine.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: When the stuffed koala starts ringing, the man digs out a burner phone and answers it. When the man who’s buried starts yelling in relief that he answered, the man says, “Uh, who’s this?”

Sleeper Star: Shalom Brune-Franklin does some compelling work as Luci, and we know that she’s much more involved in this story than most of the first episode lets on.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing we could find.

Our Call:  STREAM IT.  The Tourist  hooked us in with its story, plus the performances by Dornan, Macdonald and Brune-Franklin. Let’s hope the story continues to be interesting as the season goes on.

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.

• Jamie Dornan
• Stream It Or Skip It

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The Tourist season 2 review: Jamie Dornan's thriller returns with a bang

The tourist makes its way to netflix with a ridiculously entertaining batch of new episodes.

It’s easy to assume the Jamie Dornan-led British drama The Tourist , which debuted in January 2022, was a one-and-only season affair. Its tale of an amnesiac Irishman who finds himself hunted by a litany of strangers in the Australian outback had reached a pretty conclusive ending: Dornan’s Elliot was, much to the dismay of lover Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald), an unapologetically shades-of-grey character. Dark grey, even. Charcoal, basically. The would-be hero was being hunted for stealing from a gangster for whom he commanded a drug trafficking ring that saw him slice and dice up human mules to stuff bags of heroin inside them. Great guy, that Elliot. A real prince.

Related Content

Here’s the thing, though: His story isn’t over, nor is his relationship with Helen (who, bless her, can look past the aforementioned issues about the chronically forgetful man she fell for). Indeed, The Tourist returns on February 29, moving from Max to Netflix for season two. It begins with the couple on a train to Cambodia some 14 months later, and they’re still in the lovey-dovey stage of their romance. Go figure.

They’re in for a wild caper across Southeast Asia because it’s not long before they decide it’s time to find out more about Elliot’s incredibly twisted past. Where better to do that than the Emerald Isle? Cue epic drone shots of the Irish countryside, as Elliot and Helen gamely set out in search of answers until our unlucky lead is abducted, hurled into the back of a van, and forced to listen to The Pretenders on full volume. Thank goodness his capable lady love is on the case—when she can get her toxic ex off the phone, that is.

On paper, The Tourist season two sounds like it just doesn’t work. Yet somehow, it does. It’s a bit like one of those Magic Eye pictures; you have to actively ignore the finer details (the murderous divers, the ballet moves, that basement scene) to make it all make sense. Just as you have to pretend that there aren’t more plot twists than, y’know, plot. Still, the implausibility is a huge part of The Tourist’ s charm. It helps raise the stakes to dizzyingly high levels, soften the sharp edges of the violence, and breathes bucketloads of dark humor into the story.

Dornan, as ever, proves himself to be an endlessly watchable leading man. It’s no small feat for the man who was once assumed to be forever burned into our brains as Christian Grey and Wild Mountain Thyme ’s Antony (if you know, you know) . He’s charismatic and easy to root for despite his past sins. His bemused reactions to all of the grisly horrors going on around him are perfection . Macdonald, too, is every bit as brilliant. She serves up everything from fever dreams to unparalleled investigation skills with aplomb. Their chemistry together is honestly electric, which goes some way towards explaining why she’s so impossibly cool with his many, many, many red flags.

Is it the teeniest bit frustrating that the series concludes with yet another tantalizing nugget of information, one that’s almost definitely been squirreled into the story to pave the way for a potential third season? Sure it is. Is it normal to have to watch a TV show with a notebook in hand, ready to jot down the details you desperately don’t want to lose track of? Possibly not. And is this the sort of lofty heirloom TV show that people will wax lyrical about for years to come? Maybe not. But, hey, sometimes a greasy cheeseburger is a hell of a lot more fun than a Michelin-starred cuisine.

All that being said, The Tourist season two   is dazzlingly entertaining and impossible to switch off once you get started, despite the tension headaches it may spark among its more logically minded viewers. Prepare to binge the whole thing in one greedy gulp, and then be left utterly bereft over your lack of self-control: it’ll be over all too quickly. Fingers crossed, then, that that aforementioned and oh-so-obvious setup for season three comes good, eh?

The Tourist season 2 streams on Netflix on February 29

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The Tourist season 2 review: Jamie Dornan's thriller returns with a bang

• Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later. More content below

It’s easy to assume the Jamie Dornan-led British drama The Tourist , which debuted in January 2022, was a one-and-only season affair. Its tale of an amnesiac Irishman who finds himself hunted by a litany of strangers in the Australian outback had reached a pretty conclusive ending: Dornan’s Elliot was, much to the dismay of lover Helen Chambers ( Danielle Macdonald ), an unapologetically shades-of-grey character. Dark grey, even. Charcoal, basically. The would-be hero was being hunted for stealing from a gangster for whom he commanded a drug trafficking ring that saw him slice and dice up human mules to stuff bags of heroin inside them. Great guy, that Elliot. A real prince.

Here’s the thing, though: His story isn’t over, nor is his relationship with Helen (who, bless her, can look past the aforementioned issues about the chronically forgetful man she fell for). Indeed, The Tourist returns on February 29, moving from Max to Netflix for season two. It begins with the couple on a train to Cambodia some 14 months later, and they’re still in the lovey-dovey stage of their romance. Go figure.

They’re in for a wild caper across Southeast Asia because it’s not long before they decide it’s time to find out more about Elliot’s incredibly twisted past. Where better to do that than the Emerald Isle? Cue epic drone shots of the Irish countryside, as Elliot and Helen gamely set out in search of answers until our unlucky lead is abducted, hurled into the back of a van, and forced to listen to The Pretenders on full volume. Thank goodness his capable lady love is on the case—when she can get her toxic ex off the phone, that is.

The Tourist

On paper, The Tourist season two sounds like it just doesn’t work. Yet somehow, it does. It’s a bit like one of those Magic Eye pictures; you have to actively ignore the finer details (the murderous divers, the ballet moves, that basement scene) to make it all make sense. Just as you have to pretend that there aren’t more plot twists than, y’know, plot. Still, the implausibility is a huge part of The Tourist’s charm. It helps raise the stakes to dizzyingly high levels, soften the sharp edges of the violence, and breathes bucketloads of dark humor into the story.

Dornan, as ever, proves himself to be an endlessly watchable leading man. It’s no small feat for the man who was once assumed to be forever burned into our brains as Christian Grey and Wild Mountain Thyme’s Antony (if you know, you know) . He’s charismatic and easy to root for despite his past sins. His bemused reactions to all of the grisly horrors going on around him are perfection. Macdonald, too, is every bit as brilliant. She serves up everything from fever dreams to unparalleled investigation skills with aplomb. Their chemistry together is honestly electric, which goes some way towards explaining why she’s so impossibly cool with his many, many, many red flags.

Is it the teeniest bit frustrating that the series concludes with yet another tantalizing nugget of information, one that’s almost definitely been squirreled into the story to pave the way for a potential third season? Sure it is. Is it normal to have to watch a TV show with a notebook in hand, ready to jot down the details you desperately don’t want to lose track of? Possibly not. And is this the sort of lofty heirloom TV show that people will wax lyrical about for years to come? Maybe not. But, hey, sometimes a greasy cheeseburger is a hell of a lot more fun than a Michelin-starred cuisine.

All that being said, The Tourist season twois dazzlingly entertaining and impossible to switch off once you get started, despite the tension headaches it may spark among its more logically minded viewers. Prepare to binge the whole thing in one greedy gulp, and then be left utterly bereft over your lack of self-control: it’ll be over all too quickly. Fingers crossed, then, that that aforementioned and oh-so-obvious setup for season three comes good, eh?

The Tourist season 2 streams on Netflix on February 29

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The tourist ending explained by jamie dornan.

The Tourist star Jamie Dornan opens up about the HBO Max mystery action series, shedding light on that shocking and disturbing final reveal.

Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for The Tourist .

Jamie Dornan opens up about the shocking ending of The Tourist . Created by Harry and Jack Williams, The Tourist centers on The Man (played by Dornan) who wakes up in a hospital with zero memory of who he is and how he got there. Spending the first of six episodes in a state of utter uncertainty, Dornan’s protagonist is helped along by Helen Chamber (Danielle Macdonald) , and the traffic cop helps The Man uncover the details behind the horrific car crash that led to his amnesia.

By the finale of the Australian-set series, it’s revealed that The Man is a drug smuggler named Elliot. Confronted by Lena Pascal (Victoria Haralabidou), a woman Elliot consistently has visions of, it becomes clear that Elliot’s actions in smuggling heroin inside people’s bodies led to the painful death of two women. It also led to Lena’s disfigurement, all of which she details in a searing monologue that makes plain how awful Elliot was before the crash and why someone would want him dead. This leads Elliot to the same conclusion, too, as he attempts to take his own life.

Related: HBO Max: Every Movie & TV Show Coming In March 2022

Speaking with EW to promote The Tourist , which is currently streaming on HBO Max , Dornan opened up about how difficult it was to film that reveal. The actor admits that it broke him, detailing how uncomfortable and uneasy it made him feel. Dornan’s quote is included below.

“It was crazy, that. So much of this character and this performance for me is, like any performance, you’re trying to stay present, but never more so than when everything is information that you’ve never heard before, particularly if it’s awful information, like that scene. I felt very raw in that moment, I felt very exposed, and vulnerable and kind of awful and terrible about myself. She was doing such beautiful work in front of me and it was having the impact that I felt that it should have. Sometimes you get yourself in a place where you feel so broken that you can’t actually stop crying. [Laughs] I felt a bit like that that day in a good way, I guess. I felt very exposed, very vulnerable. You know, it’s hard stuff to hear, the hardest stuff to hear, so a lot of that luckily was on the page for me in terms of the writing. But, yeah, not an easy day, that.”

Dornan, who goes on to mention that there have been conversations about a possible second season, previously spoke about how The Tourist was his most difficult role because he didn’t know anything about The Man. To go from there, only to learn of the banal evil of this protagonist had to have been as much a punch in the gut for Dornan as it was for the audience. For most of the HBO Max drama, Elliot is positioned as a good guy. Gruff, sure, and certainly flawed, but ultimately the hero of the story alongside Helen. It’s a difficult last-minute switch that Dornan sells perfectly.

Still, even though the reveal leads the audience down a dark path, it ends with hope. It’s heavily implied that Elliot survives his suicide attempt and begins a relationship with Helen. Perhaps, it suggests, in the long-run, that the memory loss provides Elliot with a chance to be a new person. It also opens the door for The Tourist season 2. And maybe, given that many viewers and critics enjoyed the lighter and more experimental aspects of the series, a second outing won’t have quite as bleak a twist.

More: Jamie Dornan Interview: The Tourist

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‘The Tourist’ Review: Jamie Dornan’s Slow Burn Amnesia Drama Is a Boring Ultimatum

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Having a main character who can’t remember anything can be an incredibly freeing and constricting prospect all at once. Rarely does a story get the opportunity to follow someone with as close to a blank slate as you can get. But without the shortcuts of a protagonist with a baseline amount of knowledge about themselves, there’s a lot of gaps left to be filled by those on the periphery of that life. When presented the choice between these two possibilities, the new HBO Max original “ The Tourist ” opts for a heavy dose of the latter. What seems at the outset like a chance for Jamie Dornan to do some heavy existential lifting never quite makes good on that promise. Instead, “The Tourist” eventually settles into a conventional web of TV intrigue with one convenient mind wipe at the center.

“The Tourist” starts out coy, presenting Dornan as a nameless traveler through the Australian outback. Methodically going about his journeys across stretches of empty desert, he’s soon set upon by a big rig intent on driving him off the road. Quicker than you can read the plot synopsis for “Duel,” our would-be hero flips over in a mangled hail of shatterproof glass and twisted metal. When he finally wakes up later in the hospital, he can’t remember his name or what led him there.

So begins a thorny, interlocking mess of personal histories and frustrations, one that draws in just about everyone who tries to help out This Man as he pieces together facts from scraps of paper and grainy surveillance footage from cameras at roadside outfits. He has two main helpers in this quest. Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald), the traffic patrol officer initially in charge of taking This Man’s statement, decides to offer a helping hand to help him get back on his feet after he’s literally back on his feet. A chance meeting and a surprise result of a trip to the diner brings him in the orbit of another potential helper Luci (Shalom Brune-Franklin).

Luci’s entrance is a jolt to the series’ dour energy, but it kickstarts a new wave of action-thriller hangups that “The Tourist” ultimately never quite shakes. This Man may not remember who he is, but there are certainly others who do. One of them is Billy (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), a no-nonsense tracker with a smooth husky baritone and a snappy red velvet fedora. (Incidentally, Ólafsson is maybe the only cast member who seems to be really enjoying himself here.) Each new addition to this menacing collection of interested parties — also including a Major Crimes detective (Damon Herriman) and a few shadowy entrepreneurs — tips the scale further from a thoughtful examination of a person’s attempts at fashioning a new life to a pedestrian cat-and-mouse hunt.

“The Tourist” slowly pulls the curtain back on This Man as the character gets some answers of his own. Even in doing that, this show has a weird relationship to urgency. The writing team of Harry and Jack Williams start out this series with life-or-death stakes and then try to graft some intimate small-scale storytelling on top of it. Helen’s home life gradually curdles as the attention from her fiancé Ethan (Greg Larsen) grows less sweet with each passing interaction. She’s the prime example of one of the main assumptions of “The Tourist”: that anyone assisting This Man recover from a traumatic accident must therefore have their own requisite trauma to be in a position to help. While those parallels may work in theory, it only ends up pulling the show in plenty of directions it doesn’t have the grace to handle.

There’s admittedly some dark comedy to be found in the idea of trying to sort out your own memories and mostly finding people who want you dead. In that way Dornan is a flexible enough presence to be able to handle his own in the show’s more physical moments while also being a bit goofy. (He’s not as locked in as he is when singing to seagulls , but then again, who on Earth is?) Against the backdrop of an increasing amount of bloodshed, those tension-cutting moments never have quite enough bite to justify themselves. It’s more indicative of a simple origin story stretched thin over too much empty, arid landscape.

It’s only when the show makes its grand breakthrough in the final third that “The Tourist” gets a much needed influx of energy. Still, it’s another example of something in this show that feels like it should work in the abstract, but in practice simply feels like slapping on an extra layer without properly seeding that spirit throughout. It doesn’t help that what ultimately boils down to a sentence-long explanation of the root of This Man’s troubles is laden with a bevy of unnecessary detail that adds little to the ultimate payoff. This Man may be wrestling with whether or not he’s a good person, but it’s drowned out by a host of distractions in service of tidying up every last possible dangling thread.

“The Tourist” is so committed to explaining each last puzzle piece that it seems incompatible with what’s compelling about this premise. This is a show that wants points for delving into the ambiguity of human memory, all while laying out the circumstances of This Man’s pre-accident life and leaving precious little to the imagination. When the people around him largely exist for a specific purpose, it’s hard to keep caring about them once they’ve fulfilled that role (if they’re even alive once it’s done). Any unconventional way that “The Tourist” lays out its grand design is more in service of a show built around withholding information rather than being a way to better understand the man fighting for his life in the middle of it.

“The Tourist” is now available to stream on HBO Max.

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'The Veil' Review: Elisabeth Moss Makes the Most of Hulu's So-So Spy Thriller

The limited series, co-starring Josh Charles, Yunma Marwan, and Dali Benssalah, premieres April 30.

The Big Picture

• FX on Hulu's The Veil ultimately fails due to its limited episode count.
• The show's characters lack depth and complexity as a result of time constraints.
• A rushed plot reveals key information prematurely, missing out on the opportunity for deeper story development.

As a genre, spy shows will seemingly always be a wealth to mine. The espionage industry, with its necessity for secrecy, or rival agencies competing to apprehend the same target, lends itself to the high stakes and drama that television demands. Even the pursuit of deep undercover work, in which you rarely know the real truth about a person until it's either unearthed or confessed, holds an inherent degree of suspense in most instances. Unfortunately, not every spy show can exist on par with some of the best to ever do it, like FX 's The Americans . That network's latest production, The Veil , which is set to debut on Hulu later this month and hails from writer Steven Knight ( Peaky Blinders , Taboo ), largely misfires. What should be a complex cat-and-mouse game between its leading duo ultimately rushes through dropping its biggest bombshells.

The Veil (2024)

Follows the relationship between two women playing a deadly game of truth and lies. One woman has a secret, and the other has a mission to reveal it before thousands of lives are lost.

What Is 'The Veil' About?

The Veil wastes no time at all in introducing us to its main characters right from the jump. Imogen Salter, played by The Handmaid's Tale 's Elisabeth Moss , is a seasoned MI6 agent who's just come off another successful mission when she gets word of her next assignment, courtesy of the French intelligence agency DGSE. At a refugee camp, tucked away in the mountains on the Turkish and Syrian border, a woman named Adilah El Idrissi ( Yunma Marwan ) has been detained on suspicion of being an agent of ISIS. However, it's not only Imogen who has been tasked with securing Adilah and transporting her into safer territory; the CIA has sent its best operative, Max Peterson ( Josh Charles ), to accomplish the same task. In case Imogen's assignment couldn't possibly become more entangled, her DGSE handler, Malik Amar ( Dali Benssalah ), is also her on-again, off-again lover, who finds himself constantly torn between his loyalties to his own country and his undeniable connection to Imogen.

However, the story doesn't just end after Imogen manages to sneak Adilah out of the refugee camp; once the two women hit the road together, driving through the winding mountains and traveling from Istanbul to Paris to London, Imogen makes it her personal mission to uncover Adilah's secret . While her target is adamant that she was recruited into the dangerous organization and now has every desire to get out for good — especially for the sake of her young daughter, who is living removed from all of this in Paris — Imogen is less convinced that Adilah is telling the truth about her backstory. With a potential terrorist attack on the U.S. looming and several other threats closing in, it's now a race against time, as these two women remain uncertain about whether they can trust each other while slowly offering more and more details from their respective pasts.

'The Veil's Story and Characters Are Underserved by Its Runtime

The biggest problem The Veil has lies within its episode count. While limited series have become a more and more popular storytelling format over the last several years, allowing even the biggest names to participate in television projects for a small amount of time, they also carry some ingrained risks. The Veil only boasts a total of six episodes, four of which were provided for review, and its characters ultimately suffer as a result of the series not having nearly enough time to dig into its story .

As an MI6 agent, Imogen is purported to be a skilled chameleon, someone who can adapt and change her demeanor to blend into any situation — but the show doesn't allow us to see all the personas she's supposedly capable of. Instead, episodes build Imogen's plot more around her investigating her own family's past rather than establishing her as a layered and intriguing character, and then peeling back said layers one episode at a time. Moss certainly does her best with what she's given to play , and the glimmers of truth in even her most minute expressions are worth paying attention to. Ultimately, however, Imogen is rendered more one-note based on the fact that the series first teases out her history in bits and pieces before having to accelerate those reveals, as if suddenly realizing it has less time than it initially thought.

Apart from its lead, most of The Veil 's other characters are thin and ill-defined — though this is, again, a consequence of the narrow window through which to develop them. As Imogen's handler and romantic partner, Benssalah's Malik spends most of his scenes desperately trying to get her on the phone for abbreviated conversations that don't successfully shed light on the depth of their connection. Perhaps that's the point, and we're meant to understand that Malik is just way more invested in Imogen, while she barely spares him a thought in return. But it does create the feeling that there could have been an even more complicated and thorny relationship established between them, something that six episodes simply doesn't have the opportunity to build to its fullest potential. The same goes for Max, and while Charles brings the signature smarm and charm we've come to know and love him for, he's unfortunately only peppered throughout the plot. That said, his and Moss's undeniable chemistry proves to be one of The Veil 's bright spots, momentarily slowing the series down from its breakneck pacing.

'The Veil' Plays All Its Best Cards Too Early

The Veil 's narrative limitations do the biggest disservice to Adilah, whose real identity is the source of the series' overarching mystery at the start. Is she merely a woman who became swept up in a greater conspiracy than she ever planned for, or is she actually its most powerful mastermind? If The Veil had been afforded more episodes to spool out this particular thread, creating more doubt about Adilah's trustworthiness, it might have resulted in an even better version of this story — and given Marwan more of an opportunity to hint at more of the character's facets. Instead, the show shows its hand too early, abandoning the fraught interpersonal dynamics between Imogen and Adilah in favor of a more global threat that lacks the same intrigue.

Watching The Veil , the scenes that deliver the most impact aren't the ones adorned with all the trappings of a traditional spy thriller — undercover agents, rooftop chases, even nameless assassins. Where the series is at its best is when Moss and Marwan effectively ground the plot in more of a two-hander through their early road trip scenes, facing off with each other warily before deciding where and when to be more honest about themselves. If only the show was more intent on allowing them to spill their truths on their own terms and in their own time, rather than rushing to spoil the reveals for us first.

Elisabeth Moss makes the most out of The Veil, a so-so spy thriller that suffers from a lack of time.

• The series is at its best when Moss and Yunma Marwan turn it into more of a two-hander with their road trip scenes.
• Josh Charles brings his signature smarm and charm to the role of CIA operative Max Peterson.
• Moss's Imogen Salter is set up to have an intriguing backstory, but is rendered one-note due to a limited number of episodes.
• Most of the show's supporting characters are too thinly defined.

The Veil premieres with two episodes on April 30, exclusively on Hulu.

Watch on Hulu

The Tourist Season 2 OTT Release Date: When & Where To Watch Jamie Dornan's Film

The Tourist stars Jamie Dornan in the lead role.

Where to watch The Tourist Season 2?

The series will premiere on April 26, 2024. Indian fans can watch the series on Lionsgate. The streaming platform shared a video on X and wrote, "Get ready to dive into the excitement of The Tourist Season 2! It's finally here, so don't miss out on the latest season. Head over and start watching now! #thetouristseason2 #thriller #lionsgateplay."

The series follows the story of Jamie Dornan, who loses his memory after a car accident. After waking up in a hospital, he finds out about the injuries. He struggles to put the pieces of his past together and eventually discovers a woman who can help him regain his identity.

Will he be successful in this endeavour? What happens after he recovers his memory? The trailer doesn't reveal any hints, adding more suspense to the story.

Cast in The Tourist season 2

The Tourist season 2 features Jamie Dornan, who is best known for his role as Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey.

Apart from him, Danielle Macdonald, Damon Herriman, Alex Dimitriades, Genevieve Lemon, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson and Shalom Brune-Franklin also feature in the series.

About The Tourist season 2

The series is written by Jack Williams and Harry Williams. It is produced by Lisa Scott with executive producers- Chris Sweeney, Tommy Bulfin, Andrew Benson, Christopher Aird and Jack Williams under Two Brothers Pictures, All3Media, South Australian Film Corporation, ZDF and Highview Productions.