Surface review: Apple TV+ show strands Gugu Mbatha-Raw in a deep sea of soapy mediocrity

On the surface, Sophie ( Gugu Mbatha-Raw) boasts a blessed life: she lives in a swanky San Francisco home complete with marbled interiors and walk-in closets; she is married to the charming, well-heeled venture capitalist James ( Oliver Jackson-Cohen); she has a fulfilling job at a local hospital; she enjoys her evenings fine-dining with girlfriends or accompanying her husband to champagne jamborees. If her life seems so idyllic, why would she try to end it? That’s the question that drives the mystery of Surface, the new miniseries on Apple TV+.

We first meet Sophie a few months after she jumped from a ferry into the sea in a failed suicide attempt. At least, that’s what everyone tells her. The “accident,” as they prefer to call it, caused head trauma, leaving her with severe memory loss. This kind of amnesia has been used as a convenient but effective device in movies and shows where the characters are trying to piece together the psychological puzzle of their own being. That they are so susceptible to manipulation makes them easy to sympathise with and root for. And with a character like Sophie, who wakes up a blank slate after her coma, memory loss offers fertile ground to plant twists and turns in the story. The premise begins with promise, before Surface finds itself out of its depth. Creator Veronica West cannot pierce beyond its glossy veneer to cut a more gripping tale about gaslighting. It is only Mbatha-Raw’s soulful performance that attempts to take us a little below its surface-deep ideas.

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By structuring the story like a puzzle to be solved, the show pulls the viewer inside Sophie’s mind. We scramble to uncover the truth of her “accident” alongside her. As revelations emerge, Sophie starts to question if she jumped or if she was pushed. Each new detail she learns reorients her perspective and our own. The show plays on the domestic fear of one’s spouse turning into a stranger. In a marriage which can be chronicled and whose health can be assessed only by one partner, Sophie grapples with a constant internal conflict between the picture of her as painted by James and the person she intuits she is. Flashbacks to her youth in England further muddy the truth to her backstory.

Trusting people is hard enough as it is, but what if you can’t trust yourself? Especially when there is a marked discrepancy in the version of you according to others vs yourself? Just when you think Sophie is inching towards the truth of her trauma, the show throws some diversions and delays to warrant its eight-episode length. The one-step-forward-two-steps-back approach to the tale lulls rather than stirs. Whenever Sophie is plagued with doubts, James is eager to reassure her their marriage was a happy one. Suggesting otherwise is the discernible unease Jackson-Cohen brings with his very presence — like when he asks her what to wear or even when he makes her breakfast. The problem for Sophie is it is hard to say if she can even trust her psychiatrist Hannah ( Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who is quick to dismiss her doubts over the “accident.”

Instead of leaning into paranoid thriller aspects, Surface relies on soapy twists, which are often hung on the most weak contrivances. Sophie discovers her best friend Caroline ( Ari Graynor) cannot be trusted either. She discovers this when she enters Caroline’s office building and overhears her conspiratorial phone call. Caroline makes this phone call not in private, but standing outside her office where its sensitive contents can be revealed for the sake of narrative convenience. Helping Sophie in her quest for truth is Baden ( Stephan James), a detective assigned to her attempted suicide case whose reasons for believing she may have been pushed may be personal. Though he knows more than he lets on and insists he has Sophie’s best interests at heart, the show parcels out the details in tiny portions to keep us guessing.

As a woman adrift in a sea of her own memories, Mbatha-Raw oscillates between fits of confusion and clarity, and lends the twisty material some credibility. Director Sam Miller (I May Destroy You) and executive producer Reese Witherspoon bring some prestige sheen. Witherspoon, in recent years, has taken to producing quite a few shows ( Big Little Lies, The Morning Show, Little Fires Everywhere) about how the lives of the wealthy aren’t as picture-perfect as they may appear.

The inner workings of Sophie’s muddled point-of-view are written into the show’s visual language. Miller plays around with depth of field to put us in Sophie’s headspace. The edges of the frame are blurred during recollections to illustrate her foggy memories. As befits its title, the show wades into literal and metaphorical waters. Even though Sophie survives the “accident,” the trauma is so firmly encoded in her mind that she has a panic attack on the sight of the Golden Gate Bridge. The opening images of her trying to dive to the surface become a recurring motif for the feeling of sinking without the lifeline of memories to hold onto.

If the writing wasn’t so mannered and the psychological thrills so lacking, Surface could have left a striking impression, instead of faint. Give it a couple of weeks, or tune into the discourse about a dozen movies or shows that may debut in the same amount of time, you might not even recall having watched it in the first place. The memory of the show itself will sink into the deepest trench where others like it have disappeared.

The first three episodes of Surface release on Apple TV+ on 28 July, with a new episode to follow every Friday.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.

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