If you’re a connoisseur of true crime oddities, you might well know the story of Love & Death already. If you’ve watched last year’s Jessica Biel series Candy, you’ll know it intimately. ITVX’s ritzy new TV miniseries – imported from HBO Max on Thursday – is the second major TV series to follow the case of Candy Montgomery, a married woman who killed her lover’s wife with an axe in the Texan suburbs. Love & Death is led by two heavyweight actors: Elizabeth Olsen, playing the sinister but offbeatly pitiable Candy, and Jesse Plemons as Allan, the man with whom she has an affair.
The series comes most alive when Olsen and Plemons are together on screen. Take, for instance, the scene around half an hour into the first episode, when Candy and Allan meet to discuss the prospect of an affair. She has already confessed her attraction to him; it is clearly reciprocated. They discuss the idea with caution, rotely entertaining the notion of swerving an affair altogether. Throughout the scene, Olsen and Plemons are consummately watchable, conveying big and unruly emotions through subtle gestures and micro-expressions: Olsen’s stiffly sincere way of talking; the way Plemons’s eyes flit around when he’s thinking. You could learn a lot about acting from Love & Death. But that’s not enough to save it.
