'The Perfect Couple' Review: Nicole Kidman Turns Up the Ice

Nantucket-based novelist Greer Garrison Winbury (Nicole Kidman), the protagonist of The Perfect Couple, made her fortune penning romantic books chockablock with lush locations, granite-jawed men, beautiful women, and scandalous romances. And while this six-part Netflix series is more murder mystery than romance, it spins a sunny, funny, and sexy tale that could have come straight from the pages of one of Greer’s own novels.

Based on Elin Hilderbrand’s novel of the same name, the series takes place almost entirely at the Winbury family’s stately beachside home where Greer’s son, Benji (Billy Howle), is set to wed his fiancée, Amelia (Eve Hewson). In the charming intro, we see the full wedding party taking part in a coordinated dance to Meghan Trainor’s “Criminals,” all of them dressed to the nines with big smiles plastered across their faces. But while the scene looks like a vision of matrimonial bliss, the song’s lyrics remind us that anything that feels this good must be illegal.

The Perfect Couple delights in both concealing and revealing its secrets. Every guest at the wedding seems to be doing something inappropriate, to the point that Greer now regularly asks her friends and family to sign non-disclosure agreements. Amelia doesn’t love this particular side of her mother-in-law, as Greer is an uptight, proudly upper-class matriarch who doesn’t approve of her son’s choice of partner and never misses a chance to make that clear.

At times, Greer’s passive aggression is like a magic trick, with Kidman managing to transform lines like “Don’t you keep a carafe by your bedside?” into the most withering of insults. Benji, though, assures Amelia that sly insults and NDAs are just how his family operates, and she agrees to go along with it—until one of their wedding guests washes up dead on the shore.

The remote location means that the killer is almost certainly one of the other guests, and the stage is set for a locked-room mystery. Beginning with the investigation into the murder, police interviews provide a quick way for us to get familiar with the rest of the family: Benji’s two brothers, Thomas (Jack Reynor) and Will (Sam Nivola); his heavily pregnant sister-in-law, Abby (Dakota Fanning); and a mysterious family friend named Shooter (Ishaan Khattar).

They make for compelling suspects, some seeming so overtly awful that you instantly rule them out for being too obvious. For one, Reynor taps back into the same dark wells of alpha-male behavior that he did for Ari Aster’s Midsommar, playing Thomas as another guy you just want to shove inside a bear and set on fire. Then, by the next episode, you find yourself wondering if this might be a double-bluff. Perhaps the most obvious explanation really is the correct one.

Other characters reveal fascinating new layers as the investigation proceeds. Where Amelia and Benji’s relationship can seem a little limp, especially given that it’s the main thread that theoretically holds The Perfect Couple’s plot together, Greer and her husband, Tag (Liev Schreiber), make for an endlessly fascinating pairing. His gruff warmth is the only force on Earth that can melt her icy exterior, but the true nature of their relationship turns out to be much messier than the image they’ve concocted to help Greer sell books. In a game of “Fuck, Marry, Kill,” it’s likely that both Greer and Tag would name the other for all three categories.

Meanwhile, Nikki Henry (Donna Lynne Champlin) is a hardnosed detective with a sardonic sense of humor that cuts straight through all the airs and graces put on by the Windbury clan. She remains rigidly professional in all of her dealings with them, but her eyes always betray a sense of total contempt for these overprivileged oafs and the sycophants that surround them.

This sort of upstairs-downstairs dynamic is often central to the murder-mystery genre, and while class differences are theoretically a major part of The Perfect Couple, its investigation of them doesn’t reveal much beyond the fact that wealthy people are often assholes. But even if the upper-crust world that the series conjures doesn’t provide much in terms of meaningful insight, it still makes for a richly detailed place to take in a sultry murder mystery.