The Veil premieres with two episodes on Hulu on Tuesday, April 30. New episodes will stream every Tuesday through May 28.
The first scene of The Veil, the new six-part limited series about spycraft and shouting, shows Imogen Salter (Elisabeth Moss) stomping with determination through a sleek airport terminal. (There are only ugly Sbarros and whiny children in real life, not on television.) She meets her mark, a nondescript “foreign man,” then goes in for the kill. Whoever he thought she was – and she’s apparently been with him for 27 days – was a ruse. As INTERPOL comes to drag him away, he’s practically shaking his fist and shouting “I’ll get you for this, Elisabeth Moss!” She smiles. It’s another case in the books.
This “you think you know me, but you don’t” opening really did a number on me. For most of this show – a not-very-good ticking-clock caper with occasional flashes of John le Carré-like insight into the world of professional deception – I was expecting the carpet to get pulled. For starters, Moss is doing an English accent the whole time. She’s going to turn out to be from Bloomington, Indiana any moment, right? But no, what you see here is pretty much what you get. She’s playing an MI6 agent who’s working furiously to stop a Muslim terrorist cell from setting off a dirty bomb somewhere in a highly populated American port. With such a 24-esque setup, The Veil could pass for the most cutting edge television series of 2004!
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The operation begins in a refugee camp on the Syria-Turkey border. Imogen drives up a snowy mountain just as several Yazidi women recognize that, in their midst, is an ISIS operative – a perpetually-scowling woman named Adila (Yumna Marwan). She claims to be a French citizen who just kinda-sorta got swooped up into ISIS and, while present at some of their mass murder atrocities, wasn’t really on board, so to speak. But there is reason to believe that she is actually “The Djinn of Raqqa,” a big cheese in the organization, plotting a major action.
Imogen rescues her from the camp and they begin an odd couple-like adventure from Istanbul to Paris to London to, eventually, some countryside manner that reminded me of the end of the Netflix movie The Gray Man (not a good sign). Only Imogen’s mind games can suss out the truth of the situation and save thousands of lives, so we’re told, so a lot is at stake to let our heroine work her magic. While the location photography looks nice, the shooting style is pretty standard, as is the dialogue. It’s kind of hard to believe something so rote would get made today. Other 2024 efforts from FX and Hulu like Shōgun and Under the Bridge are both far more innovative.
There are a few interesting moments. According to The Veil, there’s enough radioactive material inside imaging machines found in abandoned Iraqi hospitals to create a dirty bomb. (Remind me to Google that to see if it is true – but on somebody else’s computer, I don’t need the feds coming down on me.) Another fun element is the ongoing chest-thumping between national intelligence organizations. While Imogen ostensibly works for Britain’s MI6, she’s a lone-wolf-who-gets-results type; for this gig, she reports to her employer’s French counterpart, the DGSE. Her handler/plot-complicating romantic interest, Malik (Dali Bensallah), and his boss, Magritte (Thibault de Montalembert), are frenemies with the CIA’s man in Paris, Max (the very entertaining Josh Charles). Max hurls a great deal of amusing Francophobia their way, and his jokes about long lunches and banker’s hours are quality fun at first. Then it just gets repetitive. Still, there’s probably some truth to the fact that independent agencies working toward a common goal likely do keep information from one another, mostly because they think their colleagues are annoying.
An effort is made to keep The Veil from being too retrograde in its politics. Malik is very much one of the good guys, and he is of French Algerian heritage. We don’t exactly see him praying five times daily, but there’s a shot of him readying for dinner with his family with tagines on the table. Also, the martyrdom-obsessed ISIS grunts seem to have their strings pulled by Russians. Are Russians actually running ISIS these days? That’s one I will Google: This seems to be one invented by the show’s creators.
It’s kind of hard to believe something as rote as The Veil would get made today.
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At the end of the day, The Veil is not going to be one of the more memorable lines on the résumé of creator Stephen Knight, the Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises screenwriter who most recently found mainstream success with Netflix’s Peaky Blinders. But that’s not to say it isn’t wholly without its thrills. There were several times in which I said “oh, how’s Elisabeth Moss gonna’ get out of this one?” and then she did something clever to work her way through a jam. Oftentimes this involves faking an accent, but one encounter includes taking a metal traffic pole and using it like a baseball bat on some motorcycle-riding baddies. Knight’s scripts constantly insist that if Imogen were just left alone to work her magic, she’d have everything sewn up. But other people (men! Lunkheaded men!) keep getting in her way.
Moss is at her best when she’s thinking five steps ahead and using inter-dimensional psychology on everyone around her, but she handles her few Jason Bourne-like moments reasonably well. There’s a scene or two where it’s required for her to slip into a sultry Angelina Jolie Mode and, considering how serious and not-playful the rest of The Veil is, it just doesn’t work.
Beyond entertainment, The Veil shoots its shot at some greater, philosophical meaning. Both Moss and Marwan’s characters are women surviving loss and trauma, and negotiating life through different identities. Veils, if you will. But I found these dramatic moments corny and obstacles to any real engagement – paling in comparison to how, say, David Fincher’s The Killer found a way to be deep without spoon-feeding platitudes to the audience. By the final episode, I was pretty checked out and ready for this so-so series to end.
