What if the world’s gender power balance flipped overnight? That is the premise of The Power, Prime Video big-budget adaptation of the searing 2016 novel by Naomi Alderman.
In reality, men walk the streets confident in their ability to do – pretty much anything, actually. They can head home at night without keys between their knuckles. They can go to clubs without being groped. They can harass women, if they wish, often with little consequence.
In the world of The Power, women are the ones to be feared; when they become teenage girls around the world develop the ability to electrocute people at will.
The story has not lost any of its power for being transferred to the screen. The writing team (which includes author the book’s author Naomi Alderman, making an assured transition from novels, as well as video games, to the small screen) have streamlined and brought it up to date, with references to Covid and language plucked straight from the MeToo movement.
As in the book, there are six protagonists: there’s Roxy (Ria Zmitrowicz in her biggest role to date), the gobby daughter of London gangster Bernie Monke (Eddie Marsan in full-on shouty mode); Tunde (Toheeb Jimoh), a male photojournalist from Nigeria; Tatiana, an ex-gymnast and now trophy wife to an Eastern European dictator.
There is double act Jos and Margot Cleary (Moana actress Auli’i Cravalho and Toni Collette), a warring mother-daughter duo. Most intriguingly of all, there’s Allie (Halle Bush): a black foster girl living with abusive Christian caregivers, who can hear a voice in her head and sets off to craft herself a new identity.
The acting across the board is stellar. Collette has never really appeared in much television beforehand, but she is characteristically good as the career-driven politician Margot, who is constantly mansplained to by her colleagues and ends up snapping; even better is Zmitrowicz, who is an established West End star and infuses her Roxy with the kind of fury and passion that burns off the screen.
As reports of this new power start to circulate the world, their lives become irretrievably changed and intertwined. And now they have the power, how will they use it?
We zip from Nigeria to London, to Seattle and to the fictional Eastern European nation inhabited by Tatiana, and the show juggles these multiple stories well, without feeling too rushed or frantic. And if the show fails to flesh out the backstory of its secondary characters - well, that’s only to be expected. We have enough protagonists to be getting on with.
The episodes also drip-feed the emergence of this power in instalments that feel painfully familiar to real life: first it is dismissed; then girls are locked up in their own schools; there is talk of capital punishment and ‘banning’ it completely.
In fact, one of The Power’s great strengths is in the parallels it draws with present-day society: Roxy telling a man to “smile for me” at the entrance to a club, or the women fighting for independence in the Middle East.
At its heart – as in the book – this is not really a show about gender. This a show about power, and how terribly easy it can be to abuse. Alderman and the team have done a stellar job transferring it to TV; watch and feel the shivers.
