Christian Habeck

With spoiler alerts - Above all very disturbing and unsettling, but very well done. It uses the device of the unreliable narrator a bit too much, but otherwise it's well plotted. Some of the hints and throw-away remarks ("Why did Jonathan's girl friend leave abruptly and then never spoke to the Brigstockes again?") only come together with the big reveal at the end. The sexual assault obviously was very disturbing, but so was the imagined alternative version told in Jonathan's mother's novel where a sexually mature, seductive and voracious younger Catherine manipulates the innocent and naïve Jonathan: the fact that you later learn that this never happened makes it no less disturbing. The movie ends appropriately, i.e., with no redeeming outlook: Jonathan's father realizes he has devoted his life to a futile and unjustified quest of revenge, all due to trusting his wife too much, while Catherine and Robert (Catherine's pathetically clueless and rather possessive husband) part ways... My one criticism: the pacing was artificially slow sometimes and betrayed the need to culminate in a big reveal at the end. I found it not very credible Catherine wouldn't have tried much harder to convey her version of the story to Robert once the photos appeared. (While I do find her reasons to remain silent about the assault convincing.) IN summary: check out this show! It brings up the very uncomfortable question: what do you do if you realized a closed loved one of yours is a monster?

Very enjoyable show, but - like many people here- I am quite confounded by the blatant differences in physical demands during leg 1. Team Canada was battling highly exerting challenges almost constantly, while Team Russia faced the -no doubt boring but physically trivial- challenge of long train and truck rides. Somewhat strange. Maybe the overall level of difficulty was matched in some sense for leg 1, but the physical demands seemed wildly unmatched.