Robert Downey Jr really Robert Downey Jrs the hell out of The Sympathizer. He thunders around in a vast array of prosthetics, giving off that weird, intense aggro-magnetism, and it might be the sheer Robert Downey Jr-ness of him that explains why it took me until halfway through the second episode to realise that he wasn’t playing the same character in disguise, but several different characters, and that The Sympathizer is very much that kind of show. Still, given that it is an adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel and has been directed by Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden), it would have been foolish to turn up and expect its cerebral identity-and-imperialism saga to be handed to you in easily digestible chunks.
Naturally, it makes you work, demanding that you follow along as it peacocks and pirouettes around the plot and its themes, which is largely thrilling and occasionally a little wearying. The timeline jumps all over the place, but it begins roughly four days before, and four months after, the fall of Saigon. The anonymous Captain (Hoa Xuande) is a half-French, half-Vietnamese police chief and loyal enforcer of the Southern Vietnamese General (Toan Le), while also being mentored by CIA agent Claude (Downey Jr, in the first of his multiple roles), except that he is also, also, a spy for the Communist North, embedded deep in the regime that he opposes.
