Robin Wright and Olivia Cooke face off in doting-mom thriller The Girlfriend

From Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate to The Waterboy and Momma’s Man, momma’s boys have been an onscreen staple for decades. And Daniel Sanderson (Mary & George’s Laurie Davidson), the med-student son of Robin Wright’s glamorous gallerist Laura in Prime Video’s The Girlfriend, is a textbook case—so much so that when we first meet the close mother-son duo, affectionately wrestling in the indoor pool of their posh London home, you’d be forgiven for assuming they were lovers. But soon enough, Laura’s sweet life in her sweet home with her sweet son sours with the arrival of a particularly tart fruit: Cherry.

Cherry Laine (Olivia Cooke) is Daniel’s new girlfriend, and Laura doesn’t approve: not of her name (admittedly stripper-worthy), not of her low-cut red dress (admittedly inappropriate for meeting the parents), and not of her son’s hand that Cherry allows to creep scandalously high on her thigh in the middle of dinner. Even when Laura does try to get to know the maraschino-haired young woman, she’s left with even more questions and concerns. Did Cherry really attend St. Florian’s private school? Does she recognize the paintings that line the walls of Laura’s home, or did she just conveniently memorize the excerpts off a nearby coffee-table book? And did she pocket one of Laura’s gold bracelets and not-so-accidentally let the family cat loose? What, exactly, is Cherry hiding? 

Helpfully, every episode of the six-part domestic thriller is split into two halves, one following Laura’s point of view and the other giving the same order of events from Cherry’s perspective. That red dress Cherry wears to meet Daniel’s folks? She can’t actually afford it and panics when Laura spills coffee on the garment, which still has its tags on it. You see, while Laura’s moneyed life is as carefully curated as one of her galleries—from her artfully minimalist wardrobe to the family’s sunny vacation home in Spain to even the mistress she allows her husband Howard (Waleed Zuaiter) to keep on the side—Cherry’s working-class background is far less tidy, one marked by scrappy determination and social ambition. 

Through this dual-narrator format—which faithfully follows the framework of Michelle Francis’ 2017 novel of the same name, on which the series is based—we get to see not only how major plot points differ in the women’s minds but also the smaller, knottier stuff: a micro aggression here, a tremor of tension there. A hurtful slight that one finds significant enough to linger on is barely mentioned in the other POV, showing how each mindset, memory, and even ego can bend and buckle the truth. It’s a clash the two actors clearly relish, each gamely playing victim or villain depending on which outlook is at the forefront. (As well as starring, Wright is an executive producer on the project and directed half of its episodes. The others were helmed by Andrea Harkin.)