Elle Fanning Is the Only Reason Why ‘The Girl From Plainville’ Deserves to Exist

It’s hard to justify a series like The Girl from Plainville. Dramatizations of real life tragedies aren’t like book adaptations. They have to be worth more than entertainment. Otherwise all they’re doing is harming families and friends who have already been through enough. And if it wasn’t for Elle Fanning‘s  central performance, Hulu’s eight-episode series would fall into that trap of becoming just another vehicle to exploit personal tragedy. Fanning humanizes Michelle Carter without ever excusing what she did.

Ever since this case was brought to public attention, Michelle Carter has been painted as a monster. It’s a characterization that’s understandable. In July of 2014, Conrad Roy III died by suicide. In the ensuing investigation it was discovered that his girlfriend at the time repeatedly encouraged him to take his own life. One of the most chilling details of this case revealed that Roy left his truck in an attempt to back out of his suicide attempt. Carter was the one to tell him to get back inside.

The Girl from Planville opens with Roy’s sad death, and for its first few episodes, it merely stands as a retelling of history. The series initially follows all the same beats as the Esquire article of the same name that serves as its source material. Roy’s body is found, his family is sad, and no one can figure out why Michelle Carter is around. But as it dives deeper into this fictional portrayal of Michelle Carter, the series shifts.

Throughout her real-life trial and beyond, the real Carter has been criticized for her lack of empathy. She’s been called callous, cruel, and evil. But The Girl from Plainville conjures up another adjective for Carter — naive.

The series shows the otherness the real Carter often complained about in her texts to Roy. The dramatized Carter is a young woman who doesn’t quite belong with her peers and who is desperate for her own big, sweeping love story. There’s something deeply relatable about the way she clings to Glee and The Fault in Our Stars, infusing her boring arguments with parents and rambling texts to Conrad (Colton Ryan) with grand narratives in the way only teenage girls can. We know these stories are all lies. Because the series also follows Conrad, we know he’s not her Finn Hudson or her Augustus Waters. He has too much depth, too many of the struggles that come with being a real person rather than a fictional character. But in her desperation to be loved, we see her dream.

The Girl from Plainville makes the argument that she didn’t fully understand what was at stake when it mattered most. On some level, she was playing pretend, crafting an elaborate love story for a guy who was just distant enough that she could imagine him as her perfect boyfriend. So when that prince came to her begging to end it all after years of thinking about ending his life, she drew on these stories that interlace love and death. When the stakes were the highest, she couldn’t stop playing into her fantasies.

Fanning walks this line wonderfully. In every moment it’s hard to tell if she’s actually trying to help Roy and his family or if she’s acting out her own dream world. Oftentimes, the answer lies somewhere in the middle of these extreme motivations. It’s also because The Girl from Plainville is so committed to portraying this version of Michelle Carter as a naive romantic that the somber realism of the rest of the series works.

Every time you start to feel sympathy for the deluded portrayal, there’s Ryan’s Conrad, suffering from another encounter with his abusive dad. There’s Chloë Sevigny as Conrad’s, or “Coco’s”,  mom, a woman who seems perpetually blindsided and in pain by her son’s death. There’s Aya Cash’s Katie Rayburn, a lawyer who embodies the sheer outrage this case inspired in the general public. Thanks to them, it’s impossible to argue that this Michelle Carter was innocent. But the series makes a great argument that this moral crime happened due to naivety and stupidity, rather than malice.

It’s unclear if the artistic merits of The Girl from Plainville will ever outweigh the pain this series will surely cause the innocent people at its center. This is now the third project the Roy family has had to endure about their son’s death by suicide. It’s a fate so perverse it feels as though it should constitute its own level of hell. But at least in Fanning’s portrayal of the titular girl at the center, we get a level of understanding of why Carter did what she did; even if we don’t know why there needed to be a third version of this story.

If you or someone you know are experiencing suicidal thoughts, call 911, or call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255.

Watch The Girl from Plainville on Hulu