Is The Twist in Netflix's Behind Her Eyes Worth Waiting For?

Behind Her Eyes. Image courtesy of Netflix.

Netflix has a new supernatural thriller called Behind Her Eyes. It is six 50 minute slow burn episodes which we are meant to believe are building toward some brain shattering conclusion, as the marketing and online chatter for the show promised a twist that would end all twists. I don’t mind investing in a show and waiting for a good reveal, but it really has to be worth it. And in Behind Her Eyes, the twist is not worth it. Boom. I just saved you six hours of your life.

The twist itself is, you know, not bad (spoiler alert: it involves astral projecting and body swapping). The problem is that the five hours leading up to it just aren’t very good. They are, in point of fact, extremely fucking boring. It’s a real slow burn, Lifetime Movie of the Week with better production values. We spend hours going through a run of the mill not very engaging love triangle, with allusions to a mysterious past and an oddly cold marriage. There are also numerous repetitive dream sequences, which is always a pretty good indication that the people behind the lens don’t have much going on creativity-wise.

This goes on for fucking ages, and is simply repeated over and over. It’s meant to build tension, but because it is not well done it’s simply boring and eventually kind of tiresome. When a married couple have a shouting match about past misdeeds, they refer to these events in only the vaguest ways possible like “Is it happening again?” Is what happening again? I hate it when characters play the Pronoun Game just to extend the mystery, but in the process end up talking in a very unnatural way. Again, that smacks of very lazy and/or bad writing.

So the show takes its time building up what is meant to be a tense love triangle filled with deep secrets and foreboding but it’s just very poorly done. The execution is not good, so you can tell you are being clumsily strung along until some grand reveal at the end will make it all worth it. But by episode two or three, the writers had lost me because they hadn’t shown they could do the basic building block parts of the show well. The build up is just too boring, too plodding, too lifeless and therefore when you get this ending that is supposed to knock your socks off you just end up being kind of irritated because it’s a let down.

So, the key question before you block out a weekend to binge watch Behind Her Eyes is whether or not the boring slow burn is worth it and pays off in the end? And the answer is definitely no, it not worth it. And I wish I had read a review like this one before I spent six hours finding out for myself.