Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Losing Alice’ On Apple TV+, A Thriller About A Screenwriter, A Director, And Tons Of Sexual Tension

The erotic thriller is a genre that his hard to pull off, because you need to have characters that are more than just flat caricatures either being the aggressor or the person whom the aggressor sets in his or her sights. If one or both just seem one-dimensional, the whole story can collapse. Losing Alice, a new Israeli thriller (not to be confused with Still Alice, the film that Julianne Moore won an Oscar for), tries to make both the aggressor and her target into deep characters. Does the show succeed?

LOSING ALICE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A young woman holding balloons enters the lobby of a creepy hotel and asks for her father.

The Gist: The girl is directed to Room 209, where she proceeds to put a gun in her mouth and blow her brains out.

We cut to a woman in the back of a Lyft/Uber car, going towards the train station. On the train a younger woman recognizes her: The older woman is Alice Ginor (Ayelet Zurer), a screenwriter and director of some Fifty Shades-style films a number of years ago. The younger woman is a fan, she even recreated the “pasta scene” from one of Alice’s films — Lord knows what that’s all about. She introduces herself: Sophie Marciano (Lihi Kornowski), herself an aspiring screenwriter.

She asks Alice if she can watch the door for her at the train car’s lavatory. Alice looks in and sees Sophie stripping down and is intrigued. Sophie then drops some news that she’s written a script that has been sent to Alice’s husband David (Gal Toren), one of Israel’s biggest movie stars; apparently David is “blown away” by it.

Alice has been feeling a bit invisible lately; she directs commercials and is trying to get a screenplay going but construction next door is not helping her waning concentration. Being a mother of three, constantly lectured about her parenting skills by David’s mother Tami (Chelli Goldenberg), she feels not only eclipsed by David’s stardom, but just feeling completely unattractive in general (she’s not). So when David confirms that Sophie has indeed sent him a script that he wants to do, Alice’s insecurity is set on boil.

David meets with Sophie and the film’s producer, intending to talk with the person who’s attached to direct, and the director has disappeared. Still, there’s undeniable chemistry between the two, and when Alice pumps her husband for that information, it makes her feel even less alluring. She doesn’t want to go to his premiere, but ends up going (and looking fabulous). She runs into Sophie again, and the younger writer starts wondering if the director of her script isn’t standing right in front of her.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Losing Alice is a bit of an amalgam, mixing in some Single White Female with Fatal Attraction with — no joke — Get Shorty.

Our Take: While it seems obvious that Losing Alice, which is created, written and directed by Sigal Avin, succeeds or fails on how well executed its title character is, in this case it needs to be pointed out. If Alice is in any way a caricature, if she’s at all flat or one-dimensional, the series just won’t work. So you have to buy that Zurer, whom Americans might recognize from the Daredevil series or the film Man Of Steel but who is one of Israel’s biggest stars, is actually suffering from a crisis of confidence in her late 40s, despite what seems like the ideal life.

Zurer pulls off that crisis masterfully, especially in scenes where she’s looking at herself in the mirror and not looking what she sees. Despite a seemingly happy family life and an attentive husband, you can sense how lost Alice feels in every scene, whether it’s her discomfort with Sophie fawning over her on the train, or when David talks to her about Sophie’s script. We know that she’s written some — to put it mildly — sexually charged material when she was at her creative peak, and Zurer absolutely plays her as someone who has lost that verve and wants to get it back.

You can see it in little moves, like putting her hair down when she approaches her house, where all the young construction workers are going to be, or when her neighbor so very obviously comes on to her right after he talks about his and his wife’s last failed IVF treatment, or even how she looks at Sophie both sexually and philosophically. Sophie represents the woman she once was and what she wants to return to. Zurer handles all this well, and we end the episode absolutely on her side.

Sophie is a little bit flatter of a character, but through no fault of Kornowski, who portrays the young screenwriter with the right sense of youthful energy and sexual curiosity. But she’s setting up as the aggressor in this relationship, with both Alice and David, and it seems that we may not get to know her much more than as that aggressor. David’s character also needs some deepening; he’s a big star who is only somewhat uncomfortable with his fame, but seems to be as into Alice as they were when they were first married. But in a lot of ways, he seems like a flirt with a mother complex (Tami goes to the premiere with Alice and David) and not much more.

So if Zurer couldn’t handle Alice’s many layers, the entire show would collapse. Thankfully, she’s up to the task.

Sex and Skin: Sophie disrobing in the train lavatory is about as much skin as we get. That night, after reading Sophie’s script, Alice is really charged up for sex with David, but one of their kids interrupts, claiming she saw watching her room from the outside.

Parting Shot: After staring back at Alice and David at the premiere of David’s movie, we flash to Room 209 again; a different woman who looks exactly like Sophie comes out, holding her pregnant belly.

Sleeper Star: Chelli Goldenberg plays David’s passive-aggressive mother so well, we thought at first that Blythe Danner, queen of the passive-aggressive mom roles here in the States, had somehow learned Hebrew to play her.

Most Pilot-y Line: When her neighbor tells Alice to close her blinds because of the construction workers, says, “You don’t have to close them all the way. You can… be a good neighbor.” Eww. The fact that she didn’t slap him speaks to her state of mind, though.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Losing Alice is setting up to be an interesting erotic thriller. But, more than most shows, it hinges on its main character. And Ayelet Zurer absolutely hits the right notes as Alice.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Losing Alice On Apple TV+