Cape Fear Series-Premiere Recap: Resurrection

Cape Fear
Fingers & Toes
Season 1 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★

If it wasn’t obvious enough by Martin Scorsese’s executive-producer credit, the opening moments of this Apple TV miniseries make it clear that creator Nick Antosca and his writers are riffing on Scorsese’s 1991 thriller with Nick Nolte and Robert De Niro, not the 1962 Gregory Peck–Robert Mitchum neo-noir that inspired it. Those photonegative images of the Bowdens enjoying a backyard cookout in their Savannah manse, with the classic Bernard Herrmann score blasting on the soundtrack, are lifted from the Scorsese film, topped by the pool water turning blood red, which nods to the Saul Bass title sequence. Antosca’s series invites those comparisons, and we’ll surely make them often over this ten-episode stretch.

Yet it’s worth noting off the top that all three Cape Fear projects, each separated by about three decades and each clearly imprinted by their respective era, have at least one major theme in common: privilege. The one important change that Scorsese, working from a Wesley Strick script, made from the ’62 version is that the family targeted by vengeful ex-con Max Cady is dysfunctional, which leaves them more vulnerable to attack. In the original film, Peck stars as a decent family man and an upstanding member of the community, not far removed from Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, a role Peck had played that same year. But all three projects emphasize the gulf between a lawyer’s upper-class lifestyle and Cady’s clinging to the bottom rung of the social ladder. As much as the audience is invited to sympathize with a seemingly unambiguous good guy like Peck — in contrast to the massively flawed Nolte — the ’62 Cape Fear still shows him exploiting his status and connections to keep Cady at bay. The fun part of this cat-and-mouse game is that Cady knows he’s at a disadvantage and finds ways to turn the tables legally.

Produced right on the heels of Goodfellas, one of Scorsese’s best and most acclaimed films, Cape Fear felt like the filmmaker unleashed, a chance to unburden himself from a heavier project, just as he had done the decade before when he opted to make the supercharged, low-budget black comedy After Hours in the wake of Raging Bull and The King of Comedy. Still, as a story of biblical wrath and redemption, Cape Fear sneakily feels like a low-down companion to The Last Temptation of Christ with Nolte’s wicked lawyer washing away his sins in an epic confrontation with Cady. That’s not the approach Antosca, the seasoned showrunner of series like Channel Zero and The Act, seems to have in mind for his version. Though it remains to be seen who’s more at fault than the other, Tom and Anna Bowden, the married lawyers played by Patrick Wilson and Amy Adams, seem to share the moral burden. To a certain degree, they’re both about to get what’s coming to them.

Antosca, who scripted this first episode, sets the terms early when Anna asks Tom one of the sort of rhetorical questions the audience might feel inclined to answer: “You ever look around and wonder if we deserve all this?” (No! You probably don’t!) Though Antosca takes his time detailing exactly why Cady (Javier Bardem) beelines from prison to Savannah to take out his wrath over a 17-year sentence on the Bowdens, the backstory starts to emerge. Anna was Cady’s defense attorney in a trial where he was accused of murdering his wife and unborn son, a case that ultimately ended with a last-minute plea deal that was supposed to get him 20 years but instead got him life. The optics of the deal look much worse when it’s revealed that Anna, then pregnant with her daughter, Natalie (Lily Collias), wound up marrying Tom, who was the prosecutor on the case. It’s understandably difficult for Cady to believe he got the most vigorous possible defense. 

The Bowdens are keenly aware of their culpability, which is why Anna’s face loses color when she learns Cady has been released after his mistress confessed to the murder in a suicide note that credibly links her to the crime. The clever irony embedded in Antosca’s Cape Fear is that Cady’s release seems like a boon to Anna’s boss, Noa (the always wonderful CCH Pounder), because they run a donor-funded firm devoted to exonerating the wrongfully imprisoned. Having a high-profile “exoneree” like Cady sprung just in time for the firm’s charity gala sounds great for the project, even if his actual presence seems to unnerve everyone involved. He’s like lightning in a bottle.

The gala sequence is the most promising stretch of the premiere because it marinates in the unease that Cady brings to the table. Tom and Anna know Cady is a threat, and Anna knows she’s culpable in the injustice that Cady believes he’s received, though all the details surrounding the case haven’t been revealed yet. But there’s nonetheless a hoped-for remote possibility that Cady feels like he had a fine defense and he can be the model exoneree to pry open the wallets of Savannah’s bleeding-heart elites. So when Cady turns up and takes the mic from Anna, he deftly operates on two different fronts: He charms the audience into giving to this noble cause while getting under Anna’s skin. “Six thousand, two hundred and twenty-two times I died,” he says. “That’s how many days I served.” For donors, that’s tragic. For Anna, that’s the toll he’s going to want her to pay. 

Because Cape Fear is unfolding over ten roughly hour-long episodes instead of one feature film, Antosca introduces a much broader range of characters and subplots. He adds a troubled son to the family in Zack Bowden (Joe Anders), whose antisocial tendencies lead him to start gaming with a “girl” who catfishes him into the shocking final scene, where he stumbles into the house with one of his middle toes severed off. (Cady had likened the torment of incarceration to “fingers and toes” getting cut off until you’re gone, and this appears to be his opening salvo to the Bowdens.) Antosca also includes a subplot about a new exoneree named Byron French (Jullian Dulce Vida), who is so important to the cause that Anna ignores his mother’s warnings that he hasn’t been doing well since coming home. A shot of the mother’s oxygen tank lying on their living-room floor in the end portends awful things.

But there’s one crucial difference between this Cape Fear and the previous two that’s particularly important to point out. In the ’62 and ’91 versions — and in The Executioners, the John D. MacDonald crime novel that’s the source for all three — Cady is serving time for sexual assault and he fixes his gaze menacingly on the teenage daughter. In the Scorsese film, she’s played by Juliette Lewis in a breakthrough role as a sexually curious “almost” 16-year-old who resents her bickering parents and proves disturbingly vulnerable to Cady’s advances. It remains to be seen whether Natalie will be subject to such a predatory gaze, but the fact that Cady was locked up on a murder charge is significant. Perhaps Antosca and company want to dodge an issue that was semi-controversial in 1991 and would be much more controversial now. But limiting Cady’s appetites to violence alone seems like a potential failure of nerve. With nine more episodes of the miniseries to go, his psychological profile will have to expand.

Weeping Willows

• The Fourth of July fireworks in the opening moments are another major hat tip to the Scorsese film, which has a memorable scene where De Niro’s Cady perches himself atop the wall on the family’s estate as the local fireworks display really pops. 

• Present in the ’62 and ’91 versions but missing here: the doomed family dog. Hearing the offscreen wails and whimpers of the dog Cady poisons is perhaps the most upsetting part of the ’62 Cape Fear. Scorsese mercifully declines to depict the dog’s death in any way, but we do see the animal in happier times, and when he’s described as “fluffy” by both Cady and Lewis’s character, the heart nonetheless sinks.

• Modern technology is already figuring into this Cape Fear in significant ways, from Zack’s gaming misadventures to the high-tech home security system that’s repeatedly turned against the Bowdens as Cady infiltrates their home. There’s also the YouTube true-crime ghoul who harasses Natalie on the street, so that seems like a major theme in the making.

• Zack putting the moral stain on his father: “You used to put poor people in jail. Now you help rich people stay out.” 

• How wonderful to see Collias cast as Natalie. Collias was the lead in the first-rate 2024 indie drama Good One, in which she played a teenager who joins her divorced father and his buddy on a hiking trip that goes subtly amiss. She had a much smaller part last year in the underrated Roofman, too, but hopefully, a major breakthrough awaits.

• Cady spends much of both Cape Fear movies tiptoeing on the edge of the law enough to menace the lawyer and his family without crossing any lines that would land him back in the clink. That will surely be a major part of this adaptation, as well, but Zack turning up with a severed toe right after Cady gives a public speech about “fingers and toes” seems like it might raise a legal eyebrow, no?

• Can we please see the sequence where Cady rounds up the family of skunks that he throws into the Bowdens’ pool? That could not have been easy to pull off. 

• Bardem has the robust laugh that we might associate with De Niro’s Cady, but he doesn’t have the same genuine sense of humor so far. (Scorsese’s Cape Fear is, sneakily, a very funny film.) The closest he comes to a laugh line is referring to the metal plate in his head as “probably part of a prison toilet or something.”