It’s rare to find a star whose taste you can trust beyond their performance; the kind of actor who’s proven to be as discerning in their projects’ quality as they are in choosing rewarding individual roles. There simply aren’t that many Julia Louis-Dreyfuses or Carrie Coons out there, with either impeccable résumés or a Hall of Fame-worthy batting average. But Elisabeth Moss is among them.
As a TV lead, she’s steered some of the modern era’s greatest programs: seven masterful seasons of “Mad Men,” two staggering seasons of “Top of the Lake,” one stirring season of “The Handmaid’s Tale” (and a few more she carried on her back). Even her single misfire is minor: The 2022 Apple TV+ series “Shining Girls” is more intriguing and better than its (lack of) recognition. Plus, it arrived amid a smattering of strong film work (“Us,” “Shirley,” “The Invisible Man”) that befit her premium brand. She’s proven trustworthy of your time and attention, your ticket cost and subscription fees — if she was on the campaign trail, her nickname could be “No Loss Moss.”
So it brings me no joy to report “The Veil” breaks her hot streak. Not only is Steven Knight‘s spy thriller a jarring step down from what we’ve come to expect from shows led by Moss, but the six-episode series is regressive to the genre itself. Poorly teased secrets are compounded by lazily executed spycraft and topped off with outdated tropes that turn a forgettable endeavor memorably ugly. Moss, saddled with a British accent for no particular reason, does what she can to act her way out of a hopeless situation, but even her considerable gifts can’t merit lifting this “Veil.”
Moss plays Imogen Salter (although that may not be her real name), an MI6 agent of the “can’t stop/won’t stop” variety who picks up her next assignment in the very same airport in which she finished her last. Known for her inconspicuous adaptability, Imogen prides herself on being able to get close to anyone in order to extract the truth. She gets people to trust her, mainly (it seems) by reading their personalities and reflecting back whatever will get them talking.
Her latest objective is to verify an identity: Adilah El Idrissi (Yumna Marwan) is living in a refugee camp on the border of Syria and Turkey, when the other women in the camp notice she looks an awful lot like an ISIS agent they blame for killing their husbands and children. Given temporary protection by the United Nations officials onsite, Adilah knows it’s only a matter of time until her enemies get to her, which puts Imogen on a tight schedule. She has to extract her, verify she’s an ISIS official, and… oh yeah, get Adilah to confess her planned attack on America.
So really, there are two ticking clocks, but the first one doesn’t get anywhere close to zero. Imogen busts Adilah out of camp with tension-less speed and unconvincing tactics. There’s no weather issue, no car trouble, no obstacle for her to overcome in securing the most sought-after suspected terrorist in the world. Take, for instance, the people holding Adilah. The U.N. official in charge doesn’t know who Imogen works for or what she’s planning to do, but he was told “someone” was coming, so he’s fairly amenable to helping the person his bosses warned him about.
And yet, Imogen remains intent on deceiving him. To sneak off and find Adilah in secret, she cooks up this doozy of a lie: It’s her birthday and she has to make a Zoom call or her mom will be worried. (Um, did they have to teach you that one in spy school?) Knight does throw in an extremely convenient assassination attempt — apparently starving refugees have killers on speed dial — to show off Imogen’s unique set of skills, which are… fine, but hardly worth the leap in logic it takes to see her in action.
What matters is getting Imogen and Adilah talking, so there’s a bit of hope for “The Veil” once they’re stuck in a car together. (After the pilot, I thought we might be in store for a spiritual sequel to Knight’s 2013 film “Locke,” which takes place almost entirely inside a car driven by Tom Hardy.) Imogen is an expert interrogator. Adilah may be a terrorist mastermind, or she may be an innocent victim distracting authorities from the real threat. Let’s see these two get under each other’s skin. Well, that never really comes to pass either, in part because Knight is so focused on obfuscation he neglects to develop either character.
It’s incredibly tricky to get an audience to invest in two people who may be lying every time they open their mouths, and “The Veil” struggles to convey what really matters amid Imogen and Adilah’s lengthy back-and-forths. What does come through is either clichéd or piecemeal, which maintains the distance between viewers and their leads. (One cliché that works: Josh Charles plays a CIA agent described as “the most American American America has ever produced,” and the Taylor Swift Music Video Star has a blast mocking the French, respecting men in uniform, and running roughshod over foreigners.)
While Adilah’s true identity is revealed relatively early on (and Marwan does her damnedest to play both sides of a faceless coin), she’s never fleshed out beyond her role in this story, and the last episode sidelines her in a way that clarifies her lack of individuality (including an infuriating, regressive ending). Imogen, meanwhile, is given way too much backstory. The personal demons unearthed during this seemingly unrelated assignment don’t gel with the tasks at hand, and each episode spins increasingly out of balance until the finale literally peaks with Moss spinning in circles, talking to herself, trying to connect what she can in one big closing monologue.
That her herculean efforts are immediately undermined by the series’ final scene is almost irrelevant, but this lame attempt to set up more of “The Veil” does manage to emphasize exactly why FX (and Moss) should cut their losses. Every streak comes to an end. Every actor eventually delivers a dud, and Moss is still a great actor. She just needs to start a new hot streak.
Grade: D
“The Veil” premieres Tuesday, April 30 on Hulu with two episodes. New episodes will be released weekly through the finale on May 28.
