- Network: HBO Max
- Series Premiere Date: Feb 10, 2022
Critic Reviews
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The Girl Before falls squarely into that bloated-for-television category, taking a succinct thriller story and inflating it to such absurdly unwarranted lengths that any and all sense of suspense is sabotaged. What might have been a nifty 105-minute movie is thus instead a four-hour drag, stretched so thin that its raft of misdirections are plain for all to see, and its underlying emptiness is nearly impossible to ignore.
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The show’s narrative excess comes to seem wasteful and silly — a story about a manipulative architect who wants to help design the lives of the women who live in his construction, and it’s a little boring? And its leveraging of violence against women, including rape, to tell a story that isn’t really worth the time or emotional commitment viewers are asked to make is unfortunate. In all, fans of the book club-thriller genre would be well served by skipping “The Girl Before.”