Helen Webb (Keira Knightley) is a doting mother to two small children and the caring wife of a politician. She’s smart, charming, and great at keeping up appearances. She also happens to be a spy. Her husband Willis (Andrew Buchan) is the British government’s defence secretary, and Helen is working a long game, feeding intel and classified secrets to a shady organization called the Black Doves.
It’s been a successful gambit for years…until Helen begins an affair with another man. When he’s mysteriously killed, there’s a race to figure out why and who he’s connected to—putting Helen and her family in grave danger. With the help of an old friend, an assassin for hire named Sam (Ben Whishaw), and her spymaster Reed (Sarah Lancashire), Helen must uncover the truth a conspiracy that runs deeper than any of them know.
Black Doves is a tense spy thriller that intertwines love and connection to raise the already-high stakes. Through Helen, we see the love and protectiveness of her family, her children, and of the life she has built, even if it started with lies. Then we see her connection with her lover Jason (Andrew Koji) and her need to feel something real and honest. There’s also the challenging business pseudo-friendship with her handler, the riveting Reed, and the ways they understand each other as fierce women who will do what it takes to get the job done. And finally, there’s Helen’s relationship with Sam, a long-standing friendship built on mutual trust and a shared history.
Sam also has his own roots within the city—dear friends who long to know more about him, and an ex he’s still deeply in love with. Watching him slowly pull the threads of his life back together, and how he deals with the trauma and violence of his job, are some of the most enthralling parts of the series. Ben Whishaw is brilliantly nuanced here, you feel his character’s heartbreak but also his calculating survival instincts at war with one another.
The setting of London at Christmas time* adds to the more poignant ties of the series; the cozy family scenes, filled with beloved holiday songs and pub gatherings, contrast heavily with the action scenes that burst across the screen with bloody intensity. The fight choreography is engaging and often brutal, bringing each fatal blow and crack of bones right up to the camera. It doesn’t shy away from showing how physical the fights are, or how draining espionage can be. Knightley in particlar shines here, showing off her fighting skills as well as the emotional dynamism she always brings to the screen.
Something that sets Black Doves apart from a lot of other spy thrillers is its emotional complexity. You understand each character’s motivations and reactions as they’re grounded in very human nuances. There is fallout from each fight scene, and consequences that up the stakes—the characters aren’t just cold-blooded assassins that you so often get in the genre. Instead, they struggle with the toll their line of work takes, and rail against the way the underworld moves. It’s refreshing, honestly—and having it set at Christmas time gives it a slightly warmer feel in spite of the snowy streets outside.
When it comes to this genre, the British do it best. And Black Doves is proof that spy thrillers don’t always have to be a blockbuster; sometimes, letting the story unravel at a longer runtime gives it room to breathe. And within those breaths we get a complicated and thrilling story that twists hearts and heads into an engrossing season that you won’t be able to resist.
Watch Black Doves on Netflix on December 5.
* Two thoughts about the London at Christmas setting:
- I can get on board with all the spy shenanigans and government conspiracies…but there is not nearly enough traffic in central London to be believable on that front. Also the street snow is far too clean.
- Does this join Die Hard as an action Christmas flick?