J Paul Johnson
The following recap contains spoilers for Cape Fear Episode 10, “The Executioners” (written by Nick Antosca, Peter Blake, and Tara Shivkumar and directed by Jonathan Van Tulleken).
Showrunner Nick Antosca’s Apple TV series reimagining Cape Fear—first an unremarkable pulp novel, then two memorably pulpy films—comes this week to its riotous climax, finally isolating a vengeful Max Cady and his intended victims, the Bowden family, once and for all. That showdown is in some ways the very essence of Cape Fear and the episode, named “The Executioners” in homage to John MacDonald’s 1957 source novel, doesn’t disappoint. It’s wild and woolly, breakneck and breathtaking, and like the series itself, by turns richly rewarding and wholly nonsensical.
For the fun to begin, it must first dispense with a dysfunctional gaggle of second-tier Cady-clan misfits, characters invented for this iteration of Cape Fear and who are largely uninteresting and unnecessary. As Episode 9, “Scar” concluded, Anna (Amy Adams) was on her own. Anna had escaped her captors on the Galilee and begun her swim to safety, a coveted USB stick of Amy Brancato’s phone conversations in tow. The Cadys—Crystal (Juliette Lewis), Robert (Ron Perlman), and Luke (Max Mattern)—continued to argue as Max (Javier Bardem) arrived on the scene.
It does not take Max long to dispatch with this motley crew of relatives who’ve been slogging down his story for the last five or six episodes. Max shoots and wounds both Crystal and Luke, then throws them in the boat’s hold—seeing Luke’s visible scar as he does so—and puts Robert in one of the dog cages. Dousing Robert in gasoline, Max gleefully immolates him first, and then, the Galilee, with Luke and Crystal presumably still aboard. On behalf of many a Cape Fear viewer, I’m glad to see them finally gone. And I’ll note that Max is in awfully impressive physical form here for a man who hours ago was discharged from the hospital after having been shot in the stomach.
Casting Juliette Lewis in a surprise role for this miniseries was a coup. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as young Danielle Bowden in the 1991 Cape Fear, Lewis delivered the goods once again in her scenes. Unfortunately, however, in an attempt to create a viable storyline for her heretofore-nonexistent character, who exists mostly to make this version’s Max Cady’s incarceration less just, the showrunners have fallen down a rabbit hole of unnecessary and unwelcome characters and a wildly implausible justification for Max’s innocence.
With Crystal and the other Cadys gone, now it would seem the series can get down to tacks. Anna, soaked and injured, emerges from the Cape Fear river to flag down a vacationing family in their huge old wagon—did anyone wonder if Max Cady had strapped himself to its chassis?—as their car radio announces an approaching hurricane. Meanwhile, Tom (Patrick Wilson) is released from custody, courtesy of his suddenly-remorseful colleague Lexi (Margarita Levieva).
At the grand opening of Max’s restaurant Melissa and Adam’s, which has come to fruition somehow while Max has been shot, hospitalized, or busy killing his relatives, Max is enjoying the full support of the Savannah Chamber of Commerce, his devoted following of Cadyhawks, and the rapt coverage of local media, in particular the omnipresent television reporter Tabitha (Anna Baryshnikov). Also there, to Max’s surprise and chagrin, is Anna, who confronts him in public with a Bluetooth speaker playing a recording of Max urging Amy Brancato to kill herself.
It’s worth backing up for a second. Way back as the series began, we heard a then-unidentified and nearly-unintelligible voice on the phone, telling Amy to kill herself. Sitting alone in her kitchen, her walls plastered with newspaper coverage of Melissa Cady’s murder and Max Cady’s conviction, Amy Brancato left a note confessing to the murder, and then shot herself in the mouth. When the first shot didn’t kill, the voice continued, and she then finished the job. Her note and suicide led to Max’s exoneration.
But how did a recording of this conversation make its way onto a USB stick boxed up in Amy’s possessions in an otherwise apparently-untouched crime scene? And for that matter, how did Anna keep the USB safe and dry while swimming to her safety in the Cape Fear River? You’d like for it to make sense, but it can’t and it doesn’t.
Regardless, for once the tables are turned, and Max, normally the master of manipulating media to his own devices, is left reeling. Anna’s boss and ally Noa (CCH Pounder), meanwhile, twists the knife further by casting a video version of the conversation between Amy and Max to one of the large-screen monitors behind him, sending Max into a rage: “F*cking bitch,” he calls Anna, throttling her angrily before being tackled by security and eventually detained. For once, Anna seems to have beaten Max at his own game.
With Tom and Natalie both freed and Zack escaped, the Bowdens can reunite. Natalie finds Zack (Joe Anders) back at the house, while Tom collects Anna from the hospital and takes her there. Their solace is brief, interrupted when the police arrive, apologetic for their incompetence, and with news: Max has (of course) escaped their custody. Their plan: to make sure Cady isn’t on the premises, then to send the Bowdens out of town along with the rest of Savannah’s citizenry. There’s an evacuation order in place.
As the police complete their reconnaissance and leave the Bowden house satisfied Cady is nowhere on the premises, Anna receives a text from Noa with a reproduction of Luke’s birth certificate, listing Crystal as the birth mother. Tom has a plan to send the family away and defend the home against Max himself, but there won’t be time. Standing on their roof outside in the rain like he is Batman or something, Max Cady is ready to wreak his vengeance on the family he hates.
It’s Zack who hears a sound and opens a window, only to see Max jump in from above. Within seconds, Max has Anna, Tom, and Natalie zip-tied and Zack injected with a drug. And finally, after 17 years, it’s his turn to hold court, putting Tom and Anna both on trial: “The People Versus Anna Deveraux and Tom Bowden” he announces. The evidence, he promises, will show they conspired to send Maximillian Cady to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Wielding his weirdly persuasive powers, he instructs Zack to bite off his own tongue for him; Zack begins to do so, but thankfully, Max stops him. His real target is Anna.
And Anna confesses, indeed. There was a leak from the jury room, she says; they were deadlocked. But she was scared and made the deal to put Max away. “I was scared that Natalie was your daughter and I didn’t want her to know her father was a monster.” But was he, then? Did Anna believe Max had killed Melissa? Anna tries another tack: she tells Max that Luke is his son. But Max says Crystal had had an accident that left her unable to conceive.
Anna says Luke is his son by Melissa. She shows Max the birth record, naming Crystal as the mother; it’s dated the same day that Melissa went missing. Anna reminds Max of Luke’s scar and tells him it was Crystal who killed Melissa—and then ripped the baby out of her, causing the child’s still-visible long scar. “He [Luke] was alive all the time until you killed him,” Anna says.
The accusation is painful for Max. For 17 years he’s believed his son died with Melissa; now he realizes the boy was alive, living as Luke, in the care of his own parents, this whole time. Outside, the storm breaches the Bowden home, a tree crashing through the window. The permeability of the Bowden home to the outside, even its décor disrupting the divide between inside and out, has finally completely given way.
As frantic as these final scenes are, there’s still time for viewers to wonder. Did Max, consumed by his grief, never know, nor think to wonder, who this boy was growing up at his father’s? Did Anna know, and if so how, that Max indeed killed Luke on the Galilee? She was busy swimming for her life and apparently in no place to witness Max’s setting the boat on fire with Luke and Crystal in the hold.
Natalie, meanwhile, ever a doer, has been stealthily using a lighter to burn through her zip-tie, even while burning her wrists in the process. Once free, she makes a break for it, and chaos ensues; a wounded Max nearly escapes, but eventually Anna and Tom together nearly drown Max in the family pool. “Kill him!” Natalie exhorts, but Anna, always in charge of family decisions, spares him. Their enemy finally vanquished, “Let him die in a cage,” she says.
In an epilogue, at the Bowden house, Natalie watches on her laptop as the television reporter delivers a bizarre special report—“Max Cady: Villain or Victim?”—in which she declares her love for the man. Also next to Natalie on her bed: an unopened letter from a DNA testing agency. All through the series, Natalie has wondered if her presumed-biodad Paul, her stepdad Tom, or even possibly Max Cady was her biological father. Now there is an answer, but it’s not to be shared with us viewers.
The series concludes in a scene that echoes its very first, back in Episode 1, a dénouement that restores an uneasy equilibrium to the narrative, even if it is wildly discomforting. Tom and Anna enjoy their pool, grilling up burgers and sharing some family banter. Natalie gives Tom a long and enigmatic look. Zack seems closer to normal than usual. Tom, briefly, wonders if he sees something in the distance; so too does Anna, looking behind her, the image flashing a blood-red camera negative for a final time.
And so for the Bowdens, the story ends here, in what has been a riotous conclusion to a series that has been alternately thrilling and disappointing, exciting and incoherent, thought-provoking and absurd. It’s hard to tell just what the Bowdens, any of them, are thinking. But after 10 episodes, and in comparison to the series’ antecedents and sources, I have some remaining thoughts and questions.
- Assuming Anna’s final version of who killed Melissa is the truth—that Crystal killed her and ripped her baby from her womb to raise as Luke—that fact hardly absolves Anna from her guilt in sending Max to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. She sent a man to prison for 17 years, fully aware he was about to be acquitted, his jury deadlocked, because she was uncertain if that man might have fathered the unborn child she was then carrying? In a word: ugh.
- So far as we know, Max never committed a crime, much less killed anyone, until well into his incarceration, when at Tarwater he killed those men in the weight room, then the old padrone, as seen in Episode 6. Since that time, his victims include, at least, Ray, Crystal, Luke, and Robert. But the narrative makes clear his becoming a killer was a consequence of his incarceration. Max knew his sentence was unjust. It’s a radical change from the films, where there was no doubt as to Max’s guilt, only to the ethics of Sam Bowden’s testimony proving it.
- In casting Juliette Lewis the showrunners had to give her something meaningful to do, and they did, but making her the killer all along seems like an absurd take and one that absolves Max of any guilt in the crime that sent him to prison in the first place. It also, unfortunately, complicated the plot beyond belief. I love to see Juliette Lewis onscreen, but I pity the writers who had to try to make it make sense (and, ultimately, failed to do so).
- Who killed Faith Valentine—and why? Did the police ever find her body, or the murder weapon, the strange totem that had to have both Anna’s and Zack’s prints on it? Why was her murder worth an entire episode (Episode 5, “Faith”) when it was never discovered—or even mentioned—by anyone ever again, no motivation ever explained and no narrative consequence?
- Another subplot dropped: Lexi’s sexual harassment claim against Tom. While her sudden change of heart explained his being freed on bail in Episode 9, it doesn’t account for the claims she’d made against him, those resting on some deepfaked voice recordings seemingly connected to Max Cady.
- For a series that announced its fealty to shock and gore with the coerced suicide of Amy Brancato depicted directly in Episode 1, it’s been surprisingly unimaginative in regards to its depictions of violence. Ray’s death in particular, given Kersek’s in 1991, was surprisingly mundane. While the final episode in particular delivered some physical struggle and excitement, nothing in this Cape Fear matched or even approached the feverish Gothic mayhem of its predecessor.
- Given what the Bowdens have been through, why on earth are they still in this particular house? Granted, it’s lovely, but with it having been invaded by teen grifter Nevaeh, Ray’s dismembered body parts floating about its pool, and Max easily infiltrating it and nearly having been drowned there, what parent could in good conscience force their children to continue to live in a home where all that has happened has happened? Is someone contemplating a second season, with Max and Nevaeh escaping and on the loose and the Bowdens again defending their porous, poorly-secured home?
Though it should be clear that this version of Cape Fear has a plot with more holes in it than it takes to fill the Albert Hall, it was in retrospect a wonderfully fun if doubly frustrating watch. Collias and Wilson were especially great, Juliette Lewis lit up the screen, Amy Adams (despite her character’s inconsistencies, especially her accent) was game for the shenanigans, and Javier Bardem has been a perfectly worthy successor to Robert De Niro and before him, Robert Mitchum.
In sum, it’s delivered, like both films before it and especially Scorsese’s, some pure pulp hokum, but one can’t fault the cast or crew, especially the team behind the cinematography, editing, and production design: all of those have been first rate, with numerous fun call-outs to its predecessors and their genre. If you are of the ilk, though, that narratives should make sense, that characters’ actions should be motivated and plausible, that subplots should matter, this particular Cape Fear isn’t going to be your cup of tea, unless you drink it like the Bowdens did—laced with something very, very strong.
