Amazon Prime Video has released The Girlfriend, a six-part psychological thriller adapted from Michelle Francis’s bestselling novel that centers on a fiercely contested relationship between a controlling mother and her son’s new partner.
The series is directed by and stars Robin Wright as Laura, a wealthy gallery owner whose relationship with her adult son, Daniel (Laurie Davidson), contains pronounced Oedipal undertones. Olivia Cooke plays Cherry Laine, the brazen newcomer whose working-class background is revealed to be something she is adept at concealing. Christopher Stevens, writing in the Daily Mail, emphasized that any perceived echoes of public reports about Victoria Beckham and Nicola Peltz are coincidental and not the series’ inspiration.
The drama charts escalating hostility between Laura and Cherry as their mutual loathing moves from barbed comments and sabotage to deadly consequences on a family holiday. Scenes highlighted in reviews include a wedding prank in which Cherry places a pig’s heart in a cake, an episode of wardrobe-soiling coffee at a family dinner, and the tossing of a cat from a bathroom window. Stevens described the storytelling device of replaying events from both Laura’s and Cherry’s perspectives as a way to shift audience sympathy: early episodes present Cherry as the threat, while later cuts make Laura appear the more monstrous figure.
Wright, known for her role in House of Cards, plays Laura with a studied chill, according to the review, while Cooke’s Cherry is portrayed as manipulative and fearless. The series keeps Daniel largely oblivious to the degree of conflict between the two women he calls “his two favourite ladies,” a dynamic that fuels the plot. Each episode revisits overlapping scenes to show how perspective alters interpretation, a structure that the review calls a “smart trick.”
Amazon Prime is distributing all six episodes exclusively on its platform. The adaptation stresses class tension and power dynamics within a super-wealthy family: Laura is depicted as a shameless snob with social influence, while Cherry’s background and tactics are used to unsettle the household equilibrium. The review noted repeated motifs of jealousy and control, and that both central female characters are presented as morally compromised in different ways.
The Girlfriend joins a slate of recent prestige television projects that center on volatile domestic relationships and the interiors of privilege. By foregrounding dual perspectives and unreliable narrators, the series aims to explore how narrative perspective shapes culpability and character. The drama’s cadence of quiet menace building to explicit acts of sabotage and violence follows a familiar arc in contemporary psychological thrillers, while the performances and the bifurcated storytelling are positioned as the series’ chief draws.
All six episodes of The Girlfriend are available now on Prime Video. The series was adapted for television by Robin Wright from Michelle Francis’s novel and features Wright, Cooke and Davidson in principal roles. Christopher Stevens’s review appeared in the Daily Mail.