Paul Mescal's Underrated Psychological Thriller is a Surprising Hit on Netflix

Summary

• Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee wrote The Deceived with her husband Tobias Beer
• The story centers around a love triangle between a university student, her married professor, and his wife.
• McGee was inspired by classic Gothic stories and Alfred Hitchcock.

The Show

If you're familiar with the name Lisa McGee, it's probably because of her work as the creator and writer of the uproarious comedy Derry Girls. But in 2021 McGee teamed up with her writer husband Tobias Beer for an entirely new project: a psychological thriller.

The Deceived is a four-part series that premiered on England's Channel 5 back in 2021. The story follows Ophelia (Emily Reid, Belgravia), a Cambridge undergrad who has started an illicit affair with her English professor Michael Callaghan (Emmett J. Scanlan, Peaky Blinders ). Michael is a writer, though it's his wife Roisin who's more famous – she's a renowned and bestselling author. Ophelia is starstruck when she runs into Roisin at a university function.

Ghosts and Gaslighting

When Ophelia has a pregnancy scare and Michael vanishes, she tracks him down at the couple's country home in Northern Ireland. There, she learns that Roisin has died in a house fire.

Michael invites Ophelia to stay in the half-burned house, but she's put off by the presence of Roisin's odd (and not particularly grief-stricken) mother. In the meantime, mysterious knocking sometimes comes from behind locked doors, and Ophelia is sure that she sees Roisin wandering the grounds at night… but Michael assures her that it's all in her head.

A Surprising Star in the Mix

At the time The Deceived was being filmed, young actor Paul Mescal had only just wrapped up his work on the television series Normal People. Neither Mescal nor the rest of the team had any idea that he was about to become one of the biggest stars in England.

In that way, his role in The Deceived seems oddly small: Mescal plays a local firefighter who helped recover Roisin's body from the fire. He makes a connection with Ophelia, becoming her shoulder to cry on and introducing her to a local psychic with a bad feeling about the house. Although his work here is outstanding, fans hoping to see Mescal in a central role might be a bit disappointed by his limited screen time.

A Gothic Twist

Although The Deceived falls under the genre of psychological thriller, there are some clear nods to the Gothic genre as well. Those in the know will appreciate the references to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, with its burned-out house and the new wife accidentally wearing the old one's clothes.

The nods to Rebecca aren't accidental; McGee is a fan of the du Maurier classic and the film adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock. In an interview with The Guardian, McGee said:

'Basically, me and my husband really like old movies like Dial M for Murder and Rebecca… [We] wanted to create a show that paid homage to that genre and was also just a really good thriller where you can't wait to find out what happened next.'

A Popular Genre

Netflix is becoming known for its stacked lineup of limited-series thrillers. There are not one, not two, but EIGHT adaptations of Harlan Coben's mystery novels on the site. This includes recent release Fool Me Once, about a woman who sees her husband on the nanny cam shortly after he supposedly died. Fool Me Once was streamed 61 millions times in its first two weeks.

If the interest in The Deceived and Fool Me Once is any indication, we can expect a whole new slate of thrillers this time next year.

Source: The Guardian.