Film Reviews & Movie Analysis

Written & Created by Michaela Coel

Broadcast: BBC One (Also released simultaneously on HBO)
Concluded: 13/07/2020
Synopsis: A young woman deals with being raped, struggling to get back to a good place.
Cast: Michaela Coel, Paapa Essiedu, Weruche Opia
Episodes: Twelve

Twitter famous writer Arabella (Michaela Coel) is your everyday millennial: renting a too small room in London, rarely sees her family, juggling the general responsibilities of adulthood with just wanting to have fun.

Her world is turned upside when she is drugged and subsequently raped one evening.

With the aid of her friends; struggling actress Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu) who is navigating the fun and risks of being a gay man, they hold each other up and get through one day at a time.

Firstly I want to commend the series for not pushing itself to meet that BBC 50minute target. Being 30minutes made the series a lot easier to binge and generally enjoy. Each episode was it’s own burst of original storytelling and character development, which never felt stale.

Okay next – the series took me a couple of episodes to get into, as I wasn’t sure who Arabella was other than a party hard creative millennial. We got into her personality, her thoughts and what she stood for further down the line, and once she felt more solid I was able to become invested in her story.

Each episode had its own unique twist from rewinding back to the 2000s to following simultaneous stories with different concluding connotations of consent.

Strange as though it may seem to say the series was actually a lot of fun. It was crude (some scenes I really couldn’t watch) it was realistic and gave a rare insight into the world of characters who don’t have conventional 9to5 lives.

I have mixed reviews on the ending of the series. On the one hand, I loved the concept of the ending, it was inventive and in a sense gave everyone the ending they wanted. However, it wasn’t satisfying and there was a characters story-arch which I didn’t feel had actually gone full circle.

Overall though this series is well worth the watch. Of course TW Rape, but the series did a great job of generally portraying Black Women, a Black friendship group as the regular everyday people that they are which was so refreshing.

Bonus: I wrote an article over on Medium; I May Destroy You, Is Artfully Subverting Norms.

Trailer below…