What Max is doing is playing the most long-term, high-stakes game of “not touching you! not touching you! not touching you!” of all time. Over the course of years he built his plans for revenge, turning various people (mostly women and girls) to his cause. (Tabitha, the vapid journalist, seems on the verge of becoming one of his disciples herself.) 

There’s no law against bumping into people, or having a daughter, or buying a house. He’s not doing anything, not that they can successfully pin on him anyway. Since every word Max speaks to the Bowdens is friendly, at least on the surface, there’s little grounds for any kind of legal protection. They just have to sit there and take it as he tricks them into being their own undoing. Judging from the number of unforced errors they make this episode, that won’t be too hard. Cape Fear is a journey into brains as overheated and unhealthily vibrant as the colors of the show itself.

I reviewed this week’s Cape Fear for Decider.

Cape Fear is overripe. Its colors are too rich — and rewardingly so. The skin tones glowing pink to the point of redness, the foliage so green it looks like something might descend from the canopy to eat you, the air itself seemingly tinted aquamarine, as though you could as soon swim in it as walk through it, like the humid air of a late summer afternoon before an evening storm. When Max prays in front of his Santería altar at home, his face is so red he looks like he’s inside one of the candles.

A lurid show in terms of its color palette, Cape Fear follows suit with its subject matter. Putting the plot aside for a moment: As a practical matter, this show is about — let’s not kid ourselves here, we’re all adults — the tremendous sexual charisma of Javier Bardem, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that he’s playing a cackling psychopath. When his dapper Max Cady plants a surprise kiss on Anna Bowden in the middle of a park, you can tell she’s feeling a lot of ways about it; “Ewww” is not one of them. Nor does it appear to be the first time their lips have met, either. Amy Adams makes Anna look like she’s ready to vibrate out of her skin as she walks away; I half expected her to rub one out in the parking lot before she drove home.

I reviewed this week’s Cape Fear for Decider.

Death by a thousand cuts. Max Cady (Javier Bardem) has already compared his (allegedly) undeserved prison sentence to this form of piecemeal torture. He may have actually committed it, if indeed he’s responsible for severing a certain teenager’s toe. But after this episode of Cape Fear, it’s apparent that Anna (Amy Adams) and Tom Bowden’s (Patrick Wilson) happy family is under lethal threat, and death by a thousand cuts is how they’re in danger of being taken out.

I reviewed this week’s Cape Fear for Decider.

When we open, Max Cady’s life has been turned upside down. Seven years ago, in a flashback sequence depicted in gritty black and white, Max is attacked in the prison weight room by a trio of Nazis. He gets the better of them, definitively killing two of them before passing out from his own head injuries, which we know continue to plague him even now. 

But this bare-bones description does not do this cold open justice. Cape Fear has just given us the most brutal television fight scene since the Mountain dueled the Red Viper on Game of Thrones, possibly even since Dan Dority met Captain Turner in the thoroughfare on Deadwood. Simply put, it’s fucking unbelievable. 

I reviewed the second episode of Cape Fear for Decider.

Horror is a genre in conversation with itself. Tasked with frightening their audiences, horror filmmakers naturally turn to what has frightened them. Even the very best works in the genre borrow ideas and images from their predecessors, often quite openly. Provided the end result is something unique unto itself, this process can yield results as vital as cover versions or well-chosen samples do in music. 

Nick Antosca, creator and writer of Cape Fear, has a distinguished track record in the genre himself, creating or co-creating the shows Channel Zero, The Act, Brand New Cherry Flavor, Candy, and A Friend of the Family — a mix of gory, surreal horror and true crime served at a bone-chilling temperature. Here he’s working directly from a trio of sources: John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners, J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 film Cape Fear, and Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of it. All three are credited as source material on screen. 

But the show’s very first scene isn’t a reference to any of those works that I can see. With its inverted, photo-negative images soaked in lurid color, with its images of a happy family enjoying the good life on the Fourth of July, it feels like a nod to a very different movie: of all things, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest.

I reviewed the series premiere of Cape Fear for Decider. It rules.