Actress Olivia Cooke has a knack for playing the social climber. In 2018, she embodied Becky Sharp in an adaptation of William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, wielding charm and wit to seduce her way into the upper class. Now, in Amazon Prime’s 2025 miniseries The Girlfriend, Cooke plays Cherry Laine, a similarly ambitious daughter of a London middle class family. But unlike Thackeray’s Becky (whose path to wealth was constrained by the rigid mores of marriage), Cherry has no such stiff societal barriers. Her hunger for status through marriage is a matter of choice, not necessity.
Directed by Robin Wright and Andrea Harkin, The Girlfriend is a psychological thriller that unfolds from two competing perspectives. From Cherry’s point of view, she is the persistent romantic who wins over Daniel Sanderson (Laurie Davidson), the well-meaning son of a wealthy business magnate. Their romance begins innocently enough when she shows him a property as his real estate agent. But the second lens — the one belonging to Daniel’s mother, Laura (played by Wright) — recasts Cherry as a sinister intruder.
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Laura is an art gallery curator and a starkly overbearing mother with, in the most generous terms, a borderline incestuous attachment to her son. In just their first scene together, Laura and Daniel are sitting intimately in their sauna (if the extent of their affluence was unclear thus far, they have an indoor pool and sauna in their London home) discussing Daniel’s latest love, Cherry. “You remind me of her,” he tenderly tells his mother. From Laura’s affectionate gestures and tone toward her son, it takes mere minutes to feel both repulsed and intrigued.
Cherry, meanwhile, works tirelessly to pry Daniel from his mother’s grip — at one point, manipulating the near-30-year-old into choosing between seeing a musical with his mom and spending the day with his girlfriend. As the narrative unfolds and Laura’s trepidations heighten, we get further glimpses into Cherry’s past, full of psychotic behavior toward ex-boyfriends. The lingering question Robin Wright poses is, at what point does a mother let her son make his own mistakes, or does she go to war with his seductive and devious muse? The show thrives on this ambiguity.
The real strength of The Girlfriend is how it retells key scenes through both women’s lenses. Actions that seem toxic through Laura’s eyes can look, from Cherry’s vantage, like desperate bids for autonomy. Neither narrator is trustworthy, and the truth likely lies in the blurred overlap.
Caught in the middle is Daniel, a grown man infantilized by two domineering women. His mother has plotted out his entire life, down to his medical specialty. “But we had always talked about you practicing family medicine,” Laura chides, when Daniel dares to pursue trauma surgery. Daniel becomes the series’ tragic prize: tugged between an overprotective, coddling mother and an obsessive, infatuated girlfriend.
The closest contender to such an intimate and extravagant exploration of female psychopathy is Rosamund Pike as Amy in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, but even there, we were confined to her husband’s perspective. In The Girlfriend, Robin Wright offers a glimpse into how two such women perceive and feud with each other.
Along with its parallel narrative structure, what makes The Girlfriend compelling is its genre inversion. Men in film and television are pitted against each other all the time — even madmen. Michael Mann’s Heat, Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, or David Fincher’s Seven all stage duels that inevitably turn violent. Here, gratuitous violence is largely absent, limited to a scene where Cherry wounds herself to frame Laura in a jealous ploy. It is often observed that when boys fight or bully each other in school, they pummel each other and it’s over; when girls fight, they will psychologically torture their rivals until they break. The Girlfriend makes that distinction glaringly evident.
Laura dresses her obsession up as “protection,” but it barely conceals the deeper truth: She is clinging to the last shard of power in her life. As much as Laura insists that she is shielding Daniel, she is also fighting to preserve her own identity. Her marriage is hollow, her curatorial career dismissed by her husband as a “hobby” (he secretly subsidizes her failed ventures). Losing her son means losing the last sphere of influence she commands. Strip away the exaggerated psychopathy, and what remains is a mother clinging to relevance.
In tandem with its sharp screenplay, the performances drive the series. Cooke is magnetic as Cherry, a compulsive liar who pivots effortlessly from intoxicating warmth to horror-movie menace — especially when filtered through Laura’s perspective. But the true standout is Wright as Laura: vulnerable yet domineering, she folds grief, obsession, and social vanity into a figure at once pitiful and terrifying.
At six brisk episodes, the series never overstays its welcome. It grips with the same vice-like hold Cherry and Laura exert over Daniel, loosening only in the final moments. The Girlfriend is a glossy, ruthless exaggeration of reality, honed into psychological combat. Only one woman can win.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.