Reviewed by Alicia Glass

 An exclusive wedding planned in the Hamptons goes awry when the maid of honor turns up dead, and every last Winbury harbors closely guarded secrets that render them suspects!

Oh this is a fun one y’all, full of the kind of drama one could expect from the now-classic Melrose Place, rife with betrayal, rotten love and catharsis that only comes when something very final like death is involved. Make sure you grabbed the right pills, and let’s dive into this!

So Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson) and Benji Winbury (Billy Howle) are getting married, despite the very real classisms that threaten to divide them. Amelia doesn’t come from money or privilege, and despite Benji reassuring her far too often that he doesn’t care about that sort of thing, his mother Greer (Nicole Kidman) is adamant that Amelia should be trying to involve herself in the monied traditions of her soon-to-be family. In fact, every single last Winbury is majorly concerned with money, in one form or another. But we’ll get to all of that in due time.

So Merrit Monaco (Meghann Fahy) is Amelia’s best friend and all set to be her maid of honor. And while maid she is not, and honorable is debatable, what is clear from the get-go is that Merrit is actually well known by far more than just Amelia on the island inhabited by the Winbury clan. Merrit harbors a great many secrets that are piecemealed out to the audience in flashbacks, but everything becomes centered around the appointed maid of honor when she, in the early morning of arguably the biggest day of Amelia and Benji’s lives, turns up dead on the shoreline!

It would be laughable to call Tag Winbury (Liev Schrieber) the father figure of the Summerland Estate, for all that he happens to be Greer’s husband and the dad to many of these grown-ass kids still acting like they’re teenagers. Tag wanders the grounds in a constant weed-laced drink-fueled haze, full of physical desire that his bitchier-than-thou wife doesn’t seem to want to reciprocate, mostly ignored by his bemused family as he does golf shots on the beach edge and goes for midnight swims. The servants are all aware of him, as are the fringe guests and in-laws, and the general consensus seems to be that every single last person would bang Tag if given half the chance, except his wife, who’s for some reason still holding him at arms length.

In fact, Greer seems to hold just about everyone at arms length, husband and children she purports to love, the servants she treats with apparent disdain, even her concerned publisher Enid Collins (Adina Porter). Her books are torrid romances crossed with murder mysteries, which is actually a totally ironic and suspicious thing, given what happened to Merrit. And while Greer seems to be willing to reluctantly accept Amelia for her precious son Benji, her constant snide little comments and nose-in-the-air attitude about everything from the wedding cake to Amelia’s own parents coming to stay at the Summerland estate start grating on everyone’s last nerve. This is one of those few instances where “resting b*tch face” as Kidman is occasionally described, actually works in the actors favor for the role.

Then there’s Benji’s older brother Tommy (Jack Reynor) and his very-pregnant and smilingly-antagonistic wife Abby (Dakota Fanning). Tommy is the worst kind of privileged Hamptons white boy, terrible with money and in debt over his head, popping pills with abandon no matter their potential disastrous origin, having an affair with a family friend, the devastatingly faux French Isabel Nailet (Isabele Adjani) and not his soon-to-pop pregnant wife. Want to guess which of these secrets Tommy is failing to hide? And Abby, despite being beach-ball-sized, has a very clear “I don’t give a double damn about any of this” attitude, and never hesitates to share her blunt and brutally honest opinions with Amelia, or anyone else hanging out at the Summerland estate.

Shooter Dival (Ishaan Khatter) is set to be Benji’s best man, and he of course hoards many secrets mostly relating to money and sadly his own skin-colored familial backgrounds, but also, he sports a secret past with Amelia that no one seems to know about. Amelia herself is tormented by her past connection to Shooter, even as she tries to ignore the widening monetary divide between herself and her newly chosen in-laws, while welcoming her parents Bruce (Michael McGrady) and Karen (Dendrie Taylor) to the island for her wedding. Even her own parents sport life-or-death secrets coming to the island that, honestly, her mother should’ve told someone about what she was hiding in her luggage.

Finally of the Winbury roster is the youngest Will (Sam Nivola) and his hidden burgeoning romance with fellow teenager Chloe Carter (Mia Isaac). It doesn’t help anything when Chloe’s dad Dan Carter (Michael Beach), the Chief of Police mind you, turns up with the badly-accented Nikki Henry (Donna Lynne Champlin), to investigate the death of Merrit.

So, who actually benefits from Merrit’s death? That growing little secret she was hiding would’ve broken up Tag and Greer’s marriage in theory, but also displaced Tommy in his never-ending quest for more money, Will in his need for proper attention, and totally thrown Amelia for a loop, if for no other reason than she had no idea. As the interwoven secrets of the Winbury clan and their invited guests comes to light under the dogged determination of Chief Carter and Nikki Henry, we the audience are roundly informed that, really, there is no such thing as The Perfect Couple – everyone hides something. Hopefully that something isn’t enough to get you killed, like poor Merrit.

Catch all the merry murder and coverup shenanigans in The Perfect Couple, on Netflix now!