Fallout star Ella Purnell plays a meek murderer in British thriller miniseries Sweetpea – streaming on Neon. Unable to stop binging it, Eliza Janssen found herself rooting for the show’s shy serial killer.
What big eyes Ella Purnell has: all the better to trick us with. In new thriller series Sweetpea, the British actress gets to flaunt her range, flipping between Red Riding Hood and Big Bad Wolf over the course of single scenes.
The other big, starry TV roles we’ve seen Purnell in have offered some similar tensions. She frequently plays a young woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, giant anime eyes brimming over with tears or flashing with long-suppressed fury. In Yellowjackets, her hockey captain Jackie personified the normative outside world: a status quo destroyed by the terror of the show’s survival-horror setting. In Fallout, her Vault venturer Lucy got a hard and fast lesson in apocalyptic reality, shattering the delusions she was raised to believe.
Here, she’s another fragile heroine whose breakdown isn’t so much a case of if but when. (It’s nice to see Purnell acting in a British project, too, and to hear something a bit closer to her natural accent.) Purnell’s Rhiannon opens the show with narration, an Arya Stark-esque list of “people [she’d] love to kill”—including her neglectful sister, her unappreciative boss at her local newspaper gig, and her high school bully Julia (Nicôle Lecky). Especially Julia. Our hero considers the smug, glamorous real estate agent to be the root cause of her cripplingly low self-esteem: her return to town, and a pair of devastating deaths in Rhiannon’s family, are enough to send her right over the brink.
What does that look like? Well, the pilot episode of Sweetpea is one long, painful, creep upwards to the peak of the rollercoaster, and once it inches over into freefall, whew is it an exhilarating ride. Rhiannon’s misery is so pronounced that by the end of episode one, we’re right there with her when she explodes with homicidal rage…and realises she quite enjoys the feeling. At least she’s enjoying something, the viewer might feel. Sweetpea shares some similarities with Netflix’s serial killer show You, following a twisted, murderous mind living in an equally twisted world of assholes, liars and posers. The coworkers, fake friends and even cashiers in Rhiannon’s world are all comically awful, urging her—and us—to see the taking of their lives as NBD.
At the same time, Rhiannon’s victim complex complicates her characterisation in a nuanced and substantial way. When people knock into her, she’s the one that says sorry; she’s constantly telling people that she “doesn’t actually work here”, and then helping to clear their table anyways. I appreciate that the show dares to question its lead character’s tragic perception of herself. In a similar vein to another project from this year, Baby Reindeer, Sweetpea doesn’t excuse its traumatised lead character from taking accountability for their life and actions. After the millionth time Rhiannon cries that Julia “made [her] this way”, one can’t help but predict a big, existential crisis is on our gal’s horizon.
That said, episode one is a true doozy of a bad day, and before Rhiannon’s weirdly empowering homicidal turn, you’ll wish you could grab her by the shoulders and shake her to life. Purnell makes the most of the contrast between Rhiannon’s initially stooped, fidgety posture and the frisky confidence she comes to possess later, the episode ending with her screaming fiercely into a mirror—genuinely quite scary. As her body count rises and her bloody ambitions blossom, Rhiannon becomes more and more watchable, her coolest moments soundtracked by nineties and noughties UK pop hits (Sugababes, Spice Girls and Goldfrapp) along with some creepy Billie Eilish needledrops.
Showrunner Kirstie Swain has nailed the buzzy, all-consuming episodic thrill we so devoured in Yellowjackets and Baby Reindeer, adapting a cult fave novel by CJ Skuse. If you’re struggling to make it through the almost-laughable sadness Rhiannon faces in Sweetpea’s first episode, I can only urge you to stick with it: the liberation and intoxication the character feels once she starts slaying is infectious, I promise. And from there, each episode offers propulsive shocks and big, dynamic changes within our broken protagonist, leaving her fate by the final episode truly unpredictable. Each part ends on a tormenting cliffhanger, too—I had no choice but to stay up super late and keep binging, after the gasp-inducing final moments of episode three. Purnell makes the damned trajectory all too watchable, whether you wish she’d get over how poorly everyone’s treated her or feel her misery like it was your own: just don’t call her Sweetpea.
