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Netflix‘s new thriller Pieces of Her starts off well enough. Small town 911 operator Andy (Bella Heathcote) and her mother Laura (Toni Collette) are having lunch when they find themselves in the crossfire of a deadly shooting. After mild-mannered, Talbots-wearing Laura saves the day in shocking fashion, her actions go viral, a man comes to the house to kill Laura, and Andy soon finds herself on the run, trying to piece together who her mother really is and what’s going on.
Sounds like a good enough start to your average thriller, right? Well, while I’m sure most people will binge through Pieces of Her with the same detached amusement they flip through a paperback, I found watching the Netflix show to be a deeply weird experience. Story-wise, the show keeps veering into strange dead ends that turn out to be confounding twists. Visually, Pieces of Her is oddly creative for the genre, shot through Minkie Spiro’s sun-drenched feminine gaze. The cast is a mixed bag, ranging from a quietly superb Toni Collette to a vacant Bella Heathcote, with a bunch of underutilized TV talents like Omari Hardwick and Jessica Barden scattered in between. And the ending is underwhelming to say the least.
Pieces of Her isn’t a big step forward or backward for the thriller genre. It’s just a show that could be cool, but ends up blankly going around in circles. (You know, like its boring heroine Andy.)
Based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Karin Slaughter, Pieces of Her opens by luring the viewer into a place of calm. Andy takes the most mundane of 911 calls — about “trash pandas” invading garbage — and rides her bike home. Her mother works with veterans struggling with PTSD. The main drama focuses on what Andy intends to do with her life. That is, until a man shoots his jilted lover, her mother, and attempts to coax Andy, in full “officer” gear, into shooting him. Laura attempts to direct the shooter’s attentions her way, but when he winds up stabbing her in the hand, she quickly slits the killer’s throat with a move you’d think James Bond would pull out. It turns out Laura has a secret past. And that people want her dead.
Here’s where Pieces of Her should have gotten super duper cool. You have a woman hiding a lifetime of violence cast back into the crossfire and her adult daughter is on a dangerous hunt for the truth. The problem, though, is twofold. Laura’s storyline is consumed with scattered flashbacks that make no rhyme or reason in the pattern they’re presented. Andy’s journey is hampered by the fact that Andy herself is a confounding character. She either makes terrible choices or ones, like her mother’s act of courage, that feel cribbed from a secret agent manual. It’s impossible to get a handle on who either woman is supposed to be.
Likewise, Pieces of Her has an identity crisis. With a leading-lady like Toni Collette and director like Minkie Spiro, you’d expect it to be more on the level of a high-end thriller like Sharp Objects or Gone Girl. But the story lacks the wit of a Gillian Flynn adaptation or the depth of a Big Little Lies. Worse, the plot twists at times make little to no sense or are just thrown out without regard for anything that came before. (It’s rather shocking to see the show return to the scene of the original, instigating crime and realize, “Oh, right, there was a restaurant shooting.”) Even the ending, which should be a punch to the gut, falls limp. It seems no one suffers in the end for the avalanche of crimes we’ve seen unfold.
Pieces of Her is fast food storytelling presented on a high end plate. Collette and Shapiro do their best to lend depth to an otherwise shallow story. Which means if you just want a tawdry thriller to zone out to, Pieces of Her will suffice. But if, like me, you want something deeper, you’ll find Pieces of Her’s biggest mystery will be how this tonally mismatched, structurally messy show came to be.
