Julie (Keeley Hawes), a former assassin living in Greece, is forced to come out of retirement when an attempt is made on her life. To make matters worse, her estranged son Edward (Freddie Highmore) has just shown up asking uncomfortable questions. Together, they race across the globe looking for answers.
Streaming on: Prime Video
Episodes viewed: 4 of 6
The Assassin starts with an assassination. Several of them, in fact. The series opens with a masked killer making their way through a group of unlucky guards: so far, so typical of the hitman genre. But then the mask comes off. It’s at this point we’re introduced to Julie (Keeley Hawes), who does something we don’t often see assassins do: check a pregnancy test, squirrelled away in her stealth suit. (The test is positive, much to her disappointment.) Then we jump forward a few decades, finding that Julie is now retired in Greece, facing off against unruly local kids kicking a ball at her, rather than a shower of bullets and grenades. But this former killer-for-hire has lost none of her edge, and it turns out she’s not quite shaken off the people who want her dead either.
Hawes steers the twists and turns that follow equally as well, ably navigating the tonal balancing act that show creators Harry and Jack Williams throw her way, a signature for the brothers since making the BBC’s excellent mystery thriller The Tourist. This unique blend of action, crime and comedy marks a shift for Hawes, having recently starring in the BBC’s sweet Miss Austen period drama — yet there’s nothing sweet or warm about the central dynamic she explores alongside Freddie Highmore as her long-lost son Edward. Highmore’s portrayal of a young Norman Bates in Bates Motel stands him in good stead for another difficult mother-son relationship here.
Edward and the “perimenopausal James Bond”, as he calls his mother, couldn’t be more different. It’s in these verbal sparring matches where The Assassin has the most fun, but also cuts deepest, as mother and child endlessly frustrate each other in ways usually reserved for onscreen fathers and sons. The Williams brothers keep things moving effectively with a snappy pace across globetrotting locations, from Albania to Bulgaria to Spain to a Libyan prison. The same can be said for every killer set‑piece too — yet it’s how The Assassin plays with gender and genre that marks the show out as something worth making time for.
You’ve never met an assassin like Keeley Hawes’ Julie, and for that matter you’ve never watched a thriller like this either. Come for the cutthroat action and stay for the cutting dynamic at its core.
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