FilmReviewTelevision

Alice and Jack – Channel 4

Reviewer: Maryam Philpott

Writer: Victor Levin

Directors: Juho Kuosmanen and Hong Khaou

For some people finding love is so easy, they meet, like each other and live happily ever after yet for the stars of rom coms and fashionable serial dramas about romance it is always an endlessly complicated mass of things that were never said, opportunities denied and love undeclared. Victor Levin’s new mini-series Alice and Jack, screening on Channel 4, follows a similar pattern to those Sally Rooney adaptations consumed in multiple episodes and Netflix’s version of One Day which landed last week, in taking viewers through the ups and downs of a will-they-won’t-they relationship between two fairly ill-suited people over several years.

Scientist Jack meets the unconventional Alice on a dating site and spend a brisk night together, but what should have been a one-night stand has long lasting effects on them both. Despite big changes in their lives including meeting other people, families and different paths, Alice and Jack find themselves turning up repeatedly in each other’s lives – is this a case of the one that got away or a toxic attraction that they refuse to shake?

There’s something a little unreal about Levin’s story, two people who become obsessed with each other, expressing a need for one another based on very little. They hardly spend any time together before declaring the other is essential to them but, in this first episode at least, there is little to ground this love story and limited chemistry between Andrea Riseborough’s Alice and Domhnall Gleeson’s Jack.

It doesn’t help that the tone is rather ponderous, like a film festival movie extended into multiple episodes with melancholic music, soulless but beautiful apartments and the couple wandering the recognisable streets together around the Barbican and Smithfield – the influence of Richard Linklaters’s Before Sunrise is palpable. Yet, in Levin’s script there is little sense of real conversation, these two strangers speak openly and earnestly to one another, never sounding like real speech, and yet we never truly get to know them or, even invest in their being together.

Episode One establishes a pattern for their future engagement, a time leap structure that takes the couple forward, random encounters that turn into emotionally laden hours in each other’s company and a reason for them to part again after each one. In the subsequent episodes, Levin’s drama manages to be slow burning but with rapid plot points, big life and death moments come and go, while the central relationship defies fleshing out quite as fully as it requires.

Primarily told from Jack’s perspective, Domhnall Gleeson is a fairly passive hero allowing life to take him along, totting up the big events and barely conscious of his own agency in his life. Andrea Riseborough’s Alice is a frustrating enigma, effortlessly cool on the surface but never revealing what the source of her unbreakable attraction is. There is a small turn from an underused Aisling Bea as another love interest for Jack who shines in the role, creating a more rounded personality than the scorned other woman often gets to reveal, and for the ever-likeable Aimee Lou Wood as Alice’s assistant.

Alice and Jack may find each other endlessly fascinating but audiences may struggle to stay the course with these characters and the six episodes it is going to take them to finally make up their minds about each other.

Alice and Jack is screening on Channel 4 and Channel 4 Online Player from 14 February.

The Reviews Hub Score:

Passive viewing

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The Reviews Hub Film Team is under the editorship of Maryam Philpott.

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