Review: You - Season 4 - Part One
After being spurned by his latest love, serial killer and stalker Joe Goldberg hides out in jolly old England under the fake name Jonathan Moore. The new installment of Netflix's hit drama will follow Joe's murderous ways as he roams the streets of London and falls for the latest object of his obsession.
Penn Badgley, Tati Gabrielle, Lukas Gage, Charlotte Ritchie, Tilly Keep, Amy-Leigh Hickman, Ed Speelers, Niccy LinAidan Cheng, Stephen Hagen, Ben Wiggins, Eve Austin, Ozioma Whenu, Dario Coated, Brad Alexander, Sean Pertwee, Alison Pargeter, Adam James.
You S4 kicks off with an incredibly engaging and fresh new start for the season, taking Joe in a unique and exciting direction that creates fun circumstances for both him and the audiences to get out of. Following its, personally, disappointing season 3. It was a breath of fresh air to have the show taken in a drastically different direction.
While the show hasn’t touched on many social topics, season 4 has a heavy focus on rich privilege and class. Diving deeper into the depth of the privilege and what they truly hold deep in their hearts. Are they capable of murder? Or worse? Is Joe able to compete with those people? These questions are raised multiple times during part one & it does a great job at aligning ourselves with Joe, rather than the annoying rich group. This constant alignment with Joe means that we join him on an exciting detective story while he is being stalked.
The story is a lot more complex and layered, it was greatly enjoyable discovering the dark secrets and twists and turns with Joe. However, it does have e rather inconsistency with its perspective. Most the time we are from Joe’s perspective, his mind and narration indicates this. Which tells us that the entire show is from his perspective, however that is broken a couple times when we are given more information than Joe is given. This illusion break was quite disappointing and would have much preferred to stick with Joe’s POV.
The editing, at times, is rather too quick or too slow. Cutting in unusual moments that came across rather jarring. While only minor, it does take you out for a few moments which hurt while being deeply immersed in the story. As much as I love the approach to breaking down class, I would have liked a little more depth with a couple other rich characters in the friend group that only came across as comic relief & that personally didn’t work for me.
As we are only through half a season of the show, it’s hard to go too in depth on the review as we don’t have the full picture quite yet. But You Season 4 part 1 is the fresh new direction I’m glad it took. It’s just as thrilling and engaging as season 1 & 2. As well as being complex enough to offer exciting new directions in its second half, possibly becoming my favourite season of the show so far. Penn is as excellent as ever & the cast all round are surprisingly strong and well rounded.
