Keira Knightley knows her voice, the beasts unleashed and restrained by its pits and zeniths. This knowledge is nowhere more cunningly on display than in the Joe Barton-created series Black Doves, about a spy and an assassin out to save themselves and the world, all before Christmas dinner. Episode after episode, Knightley flickers through registers as her character, Helen Webb, either performs or skewers femininity. Her co-star Ben Whishaw, meanwhile, often retains a levelled cool, all the more unnerving as he blows people's heads open with a shotgun.
While Knightley paints a vibrant picture of a woman whirling maniacally, veritably at her wit's end as she quite literally fights for survival, Whishaw is calm personified, even as his world falls apart around him. Together, they flesh out the emotional landscape of Black Doves to such endearing and compelling proportions that one wonders how we could have gone so long without this at-once sweet and dire buddy-spy thriller. Not only is Black Doves a damn good time, it also delivers two powerhouse performances in Knightley and Whishaw, who leave the six-episode series an instant classic.
The show follows Helen, who ostensibly is the perfect wife to Wallace Webb (Andrew Buchan), a Conservative Party member of the British parliament who's well on track to becoming the next Prime Minister. A consummate housewife, Helen manages her and Wallace's home, and their twins Oliver and Jacqueline, with easy skill and evident joy, organizing all their affairs — social and domestic — to seamless perfection.
On the surface, the Webbs seem like an ideal family, embodying a clean, conservative wholesomeness: white, smiling, proper. It's not long, however, before we learn about Helen's true identity: she is a Black Dove, a spy at an independent intelligence-gathering agency. She has been working undercover for the past 10 years, the length of her relationship with Wallace, gathering information about the goings-on at parliament by hacking Wallace's networks and sending intel to her boss Reed (Sarah Lancashire).
Everything in Helen's life has been in service to intelligence gathering: her marriage, her kids, her performance as the perfect wife. This is not to say that Helen doesn't love her kids, nor that she hasn't grown to appreciate Wallace — she certainly has, but it has all been contrived and coordinated. It's no surprise, then, when it is revealed that she has been having a passionate affair with a civil worker named Jason Davies (Andrew Koji). This has been all Helen's own; not for work, not for Reed, not for anyone but herself. When Jason turns up dead alongside two other people, seemingly unconnected victims of a professional hit, Helen's world is upended and she wants revenge. Reed, suspecting nefarious and dangerous forces at work, sends Sam (Whishaw) to protect Helen. The two used to be partners until Sam himself went into hiding; now united, they work to solve the tangled web of intrigue and murder laying siege to their lives.
Knightley delivers a career-best performance. As Helen, she is at once controlled and teetering unsteadily, depicting Helen as a woman desperately trying to balance her straight life against molten yet verboten yearnings, the mess they've created, existential uncertainty, and her work as a spy. Helen is certainly controlled as a trained spy, but when Jason is killed, everything threatens to topple as she is fuelled by nothing other than the raw and brute desire for revenge.
As she corrals her training in combat and espionage to the surface — practicing combat for the first time in a little while — she falls into old habits with a measure of unhinged passion. The love of her life has been murdered, after all, and she will make everyone and anyone pay for it, all while still managing to get the Christmas shopping done. She remains persistent in her goal even as she traces Jason's killers to the American Embassy, or foolishly pursues the leader of a global crime family. As Helen measures oughts against wants, Knightley's face reveals Helen's internal struggle between decorum, guilt, duty and grief. It's in the furrow of her brows, the darkening of her eyes, the determination in her stride and the tears she wipes away in secret — the cutting heartbreak that Helen is experiencing. With Helen, Barton has crafted a complex woman struggling to survive the weight of the masks she wears; a spy trying to wrench some joy out of a life of work.
Helen's story, though certainly larger than life, also retains an intuitive truth as Knightley plays her. Knightley is mesmerizing in her acute awareness of her character, making progressively clear the primal forces churning within and guiding Helen as she rushes headfirst into calamity, or slumps under the weight of her masks, often in the crosshairs of existential angst. Wounded and trembling under the glaring awareness of a lack of self, her affair with Jason becomes all the more tender and heartbreaking — it was a moment, Knightley shows with halting words, of agency, of making meaning for herself. Helen's journey is one of learning to trust in the constancy and invigorating power of her primal forces, like love.
I keep returning to a scene within one of the final episodes. Helen squares off against a younger version of herself in a jewellery store; Reed has brought in a hungry young spy in case Helen fails in her work, and the woman is keen to dethrone Helen. But, inexperienced as she is, the younger spy loses easily against the formidable Helen, who is especially enraged at the woman's encroachments against her children. When Helen has the other woman pinned to the ground, a blade against her neck, the latter asks, breathlessly, "Are you going to kill me?" "You gonna talk about my children again," Helen replies in a low rumble, and it's not a question. It's the scariest Knightley has ever looked or sounded.
As Helen leans closer to the younger woman, her face falls into shadow, and we see only the gleam of her teeth and the arch of her dark eyebrows — she looks like a fearsome, folkloric monster. "You know I'm not going to kill you, because I'm still Helen Webb, and Helen Webb doesn't stab girls to death in jewellery stores on Christmas Eve," she says. Knightley utters the sentence slowly, each word a furry growl rising from deep within her, that molten space within the pit of her stomach that houses feelings of biblical proportions. Knightely's guttural sound here recalls Keanu Reeves's voice in the first John Wick film, containing that same animal anger — that molten ire. It emenates from the monster within her that loves ferociously and is angered triumphantly, and it is so beautifully at odds with the high clip of Helen's posh London accent, with which she performs the role of nurturing femininity. Knightley commands her voice in accordance with each of Helen's masks, but when the darkness within Helen is riled up, all masks fall by the wayside and we hear the gruesome, indignant Helen — the woman to whom love and spycraft come easy.
Whishaw likewise delivers a breathtaking performance with Sam, the cool assassin and also Helen's only real friend. Barton doesn't withhold complexity from Sam either, delivering instead an intricate man grieving the love of a lifetime. The reason Sam previously left London was that his partner Michael (Omari Douglas) discovered the realities of Sam's work. To protect Michael, Sam absconded to Italy, abruptly ending the relationship. Upon his arrival, Sam and Michael are attracted to each other like magnets, with each simultaneously wanting to reignite the relationship but also apprehensive of the consequences of Sam's assassin lifestyle. Whishaw is a marvel to behold: silently, with stillness, he depicts a larger-than-life heartbreak in his warm eyes and trembling mouth as he sits alone and thinks of the pure happiness he had with Michael. Communicating more in a single gaze than any expository dialogue ever could, Whishaw's Sam is a doomed man, aware of his bind: a good and dutiful assassin, he possesses the tearful knowledge that the luxury of blinding love has no space in his life.
Black Doves' gift is its psychological and emotional acumen. As both Helen and Sam hunt through the London they experienced true love in, memories of that happiness seize them, often arresting them mid-stride. The sound of a train, the feel of linen, the façade of a restaurant all petrify the spies in the midst of their work, having them actively choose time and again the life they are living, the dangerous paths they are traversing over the beautiful past.
While Sam is certain of his identity as an assassin, and in a sense chooses his heartbreak, Helen has no clear understanding of who she is. Is she the dutiful wife? Is she a mother? We, and Helen, learn of the woman's identity in the negative, in what she chooses to do in secret or within her heart. Helen fights with all she's got for those she loves, even if the ones she loves have been accrued through a life of lies. Love is everything in this show — it can drive us mad, to murder, to vengeance.
Knightley and Whishsaw are captivating together, their banter pitch-perfect, their comedic timing one for the ages, and their chemistry redolent of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn's. Helen and Sam's friendship is forgiving and sweet, the rare kind that sees each ragging the other one minute, and understandingly wiping the other's tears away the next. For Helen and Sam, love and our capacity for it, even more than where and with whom it lies, tells us all we need to know about ourselves, and lets us know that we're still human. Black Doves is a whip-smart show that leads Knightley and Whishsaw elevate above the confines of any genre to an abiding classic.