Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: A 1970s espionage thriller gets a fresh redo in The Day of the Jackal.
Line up the shot. Check wind speed. Calculate distance. Anticipate movement. Sky’s new spy series, a (loose) adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal, takes pleasure in the details. In its premiere episode, we observe Eddie Redmayne’s nameless assassin, later self-dubbed “The Jackal”, cloistered away in a German hotel room. His hard-shelled suitcase can be dissembled and reassembled as a sniper rifle. He’s calm, but swift in his preparation. His target is at a seemingly impossible distance. His calculations need to be correct, down to the millisecond.
It’s impossible to breathe when he pulls that trigger. All we can do, as an audience, is sit up, unsure how, when, or if that bullet will kill a man. It’s a real show-off way for creator Ronan Bennett, also behind Top Boy, to kick off his series, and I mean that purely as a compliment. We can barely move these days for television shows about spies, about crime, about intricate cat-and-mouse games stretched out across glamorous locales (this encompasses the UK, Germany, Spain, Croatia, Estonia, etc etc).
The prospect of another nine episodes of the stuff was a little wearying. But a sniper scene that tightly choreographed, and chillingly shot? It’s like a shot of adrenaline. And while The Day of the Jackal, over time, does degrade fairly quickly into the standard fare—lots of tense boardroom meetings and phone calls, and characters searching up things on the web that should seem fairly self-explanatory, like the definition of the word “jackal”—there are still moments here that grab the attention.
One of them is the whole moral grey of the affair. So much of the plot of Forsyth’s book, and consequently its 1973 film, has been altered. “The Jackal”’s big target, now, isn’t French president Charles de Gaulle, but a tech bro seemingly with a conscience, Ulle Dag Charles (Khalid Abdalla). He’s about to launch a new project, River, that will promise both “financial transparency” and “global economic justice”. They say those two phrases a couple of times. I’m not exactly sure what that means or how it would be achieved, but it only matters to the extent that he’s upset the status quo. And the status quo has murder on its mind.
But, the last guy he killed was a far-right politician. So, “The Jackal”, in order to do his job, can’t really afford morality. Neither can his adversary, Bianca (Lashana Lynch), the MI6 specialist on his trail, who crosses an ethical line so brazenly in the first episode that it’s firmly established she’s no maverick Bond-type to rally behind. She’s just as soulless—and Lynch, who has a kind of natural earnestness and likeability to her, uses it strikingly to her advantage. Bianca softens her voice when she wants to manipulate people. Lynch is pulling our strings, as well.
I’m not sure Redmayne is quite as well cast. His sharp-edged cheekbones and crystal-blue eyes give him the convincing look of a hired killer, but the transition of when he heads home to his doting wife, Nuria (Úrsula Corberó), and starts to smile and soften doesn’t quite work—neither personalities feel like a mask, but nor does the transition between them feel smooth. Still, his meticulousness is fascinating, and it’s fun simply to track each of his little mistakes, to wonder which one might (if anything does) spell his downfall. The Day of the Jackal lets us become our own patient predators, as we hold back and wait for the narrative to strike.
