Love and Death Episode 4 Review: The HBO Max miniseries is a true-crime story starring Elizabeth Olsen as Candy Montgomery, Jesse Plemons as Allan Gore, Lily Rabe as Betty Gore, Krysten Ritter as Sherry Cleckler, Elizabeth Marvel as Jackie Ponder, Patrick Fugit as Pat Montgomery and others. The series has been created and written for TV by David E Kelley, and directed by Lesli Linka Glatter. In addition to the two crew members, Nicole Kidman and Per Saari are also few of the executive producers of the show.
Love and Death Episode 4 Review Contains Spoilers
Premiering on May 4, 2023, Love and Death Episode 4, titled ‘Do No Evil’ has a runtime of 51 minutes. Based on Texas Monthly articles and the book Evidence of Love by Jim Atkinson and John Bloom, this series maps out the real life story of a Texan housewife, who was ultimately accused of brutally murdering her friend in the ’80s. With Nicole Kidman as one of the executive producers of the show, it’s quite likely that the thematic thrust of the series will take you back to her own former show Big Little Lies.
Love and Death Episode 4 Review
If the first three episodes that dropped together on the premiere date did much to establish the context and the settings of these real-life people, now turned into characters, the 4th episode picks up right where the fateful revelation of Episode 3 left us fearing everything in sight. For a second, the fourth episode lets its reins taut, allowing us feel to relieved, but only for a second before absolute darkness prevails over the lives of the characters left standing.
The already known brutal strike down finally happens halfway into the season, and its aftermath is a sight people can’t bear to look at. The incident is murderous and bloody to the extent that even the town’s representative police force isn’t able to witness the mishap’s crime scene. And it all makes perfect sense, given the idea that such a crime hadn’t made headlines in the small town for a minute.
Driven by the community’s religiosity, all of its members aren’t able to perceive this to be a doing of a fellow human being; rather they instantly attach its name to a “monster”. And again, as we’ve seen before, this community is all about keeping up with one’s familial relationships, so the loss of Betty Gore’s life is conflated with the idea of a piece gone missing from the Gore family, more than it being solely about her.
Elizabeth Olsen’s performance drove me crazy with how chilling, calculated, yet out of bonds it was. Being the perpetrator and the only standing human witness of the crime, her character still continues to go on about her daily life schedules while pushing for a story in everyone’s face to convey that she was elsewhere at the time of the misfortune. The rest of the cast does a great job at allowing her character that much space to controllably lash out, and so, in that manner, this particular episode becomes all about her, in a way.
A basic remark made by the police chief during Episode 4 still stands out for me, as he mentioned how this wasn’t a “premeditated” doing, but a circumstantial happening owing to the signs of struggle that still speak volumes at the crime scene despite Betty not being in the picture anymore. It goes back to the messaged relayed by Candy in the first episode that she never wanted to hurt anyone by getting into this affair with Allan. However, it’s ironic how her desire for wanting to be more “reckless” and have freedom in her life soon makes a criminal out of her.
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Seeing that Candy only reacted so viciously upon being taunted and attacked by Betty in the first place, it almost feels as if the supposed ideal woman, as represented through Betty’s morals (her not even allowing her daughter to dress up Olivia Newton-John’s character in Grease), has turned into a microcosmically universal harbinger of punishment meant for Candy upon her transgression of the community’s code of conduct.
Olsen’s acting in this episode scared me because, I, as the audience, was the only one (yet) who knew what she had done and still she went on cleaning up the mess on her end to erase any and all sorts of signs implicating her role in the crime. Moreover, when Allan finally opens up to his daughter about her mother’s death, he asks for Candy and Pat’s support to be there beside him and Alyssa to soften the blow on her.
And so she does exactly that by caressing and hugging both of them once the reality of Betty never coming back is out. It almost made me shiver considering that she already knew what she’d done and still stepped in to console both – Betty’s daughter as well as her mother in a scene later on. This convoluted image left me feeling so conflicted about Candy, but it all became even more tumultuous to accept when she was asked to visit the police station for her statement (as she was the supposed “second-to-last” person to have met Betty as far as others were concerned).
That moment of her speaking to the police about the made-up story that she’d been feeding others earlier resulted in contradictory thoughts in my head, and part of the credit for this goes to the direction and the vision that’s brought alive on the screen when she’s narrating the fake story. In those moments, a part of me didn’t want her to be found out, but the way the scene progresses, it felt as if the three policemen standing opposite to her had already caught her lies.
Yet again, the scene is done quite brilliantly if we take into account the fact that it all appears so to us in order to convey Candy’s heightened anxiety in that moment. So, it’s not so much an objective shot, bur rather one that takes shape as per Candy’s thoughts, fears and insecurities.
Love and Death Episode 4: Final Thoughts
It has been a delight to watch Elizabeth Olsen in this series. Going back to how she’s previously played the role of a “housewife” of sorts before in WandaVision, even there, when she finally spirals down, I started to fear her character and her powers. However, then her actions were a means of dealing with the loss of her family, so the series painted her in an empathetic light that ultimately made the viewers feel a tinkling of the strength of her grief and how it drover her to do all that.
However, that picture is inverted in this series, because here the “housewife” isn’t so much as restoring her family (her initial affair with Allan), as she was stepping out of the societal bounds that were socially drawn to keep her in. Of course, she can’t be metaphorically caged in for so long, yet the irony is that in the coming episodes, her metaphorical cage will transform into a literal confinement when her crime will be found out.
New episodes of Love and Death will stream every Thursday till May 25, 2023. For the Indian audience, the show is also available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
Also read: Our Previous Reviews of Love and Death