The Girl Before

While the dual narrative structure creates a sense of foreboding and of history repeating itself, it comes at the price of undermining some of the dramatic tension. Every time the claustrophobia builds, we are thrown back into another timeline.

J.P. Delaney has stretched his bestseller to four hours, pretty much the bare minimum for calling yourself a TV show, which is at least two hours more time than the story can justify. It’s repetitive, predictable and comfortably outlasts my patience with house-based metaphors.

“The Girl Before” is content to lean on its twin-timeline premise and a cool-looking house and fails to do anything interesting with either.

Though the series boasts a strong cast, slick production design, a haunting score from Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, and strong material that could make for a captivating four-part limited series, “The Girl Before” feels thematically aimless, in over its head with narrative threads, and more interested in plot twists than creating relatable, believable characters.

As the shows progress and they begin mucking around with their hairstyles, difficult morphs into near-impossible and all the doppelganger gimmickry makes it feel like you're sitting through every scene twice. Which, as any good minimalist can tell you, is about 1.5 times too many.

I found The Girl Before frustrating, if not downright ludicrous at times.