Something to watch tonight: Thursday 26 September

The Widow (Williams, 2019)

First of all apo­lo­gies for miss­ing our appoint­ment yes­ter­day. I have been hav­ing some annoy­ing prob­lems with the laptop – slowly get­ting worse so they had to be atten­ded to – and ended up spend­ing sev­er­al hours in a chat ses­sion with Apple yes­ter­day after­noon and then over an hour on the phone with a seni­or Helpdesk per­son in Sydney.

Despite being super-helpful, they weren’t actu­ally able to solve the prob­lem so I am limp­ing along for a while and as soon as I click ‘send’ on this edi­tion, I’ll be attempt­ing a full restore from one of last week’s Time Machine backups. Wish me luck!

The whole busi­ness has made a mess of my plans for this week.

It only came out in mid-2019, but so much has happened since then that The Widow has simply dis­ap­peared from con­scious­ness. It cer­tainly dis­ap­peared from mine. To my sur­prise, look­ing back through old RNZ Widescreen reviews, there it was.

Ah, that’s right, I thought, I vaguely recall quite lik­ing that.

And evid­ently we did:

Action star Kate Beckinsale (the Underworld fran­chise) is the lead. She plays Georgia, a recently wid­owed former Captain in the British Army, tend­ing her emo­tion­al wounds at her family’s cot­tage in the Welsh moun­tains. Her hus­band Will was an aid work­er who died in a plane crash in the Democratic Republic of Congo so ima­gine her sur­prise when she she sees him on tele­vi­sion, dur­ing the cov­er­age of a riot in the DRC’s cap­it­al of Kinshasa.

Against the advice of fam­ily friend (and former Military Intelligence chief) Charles Dance, she hops on a plane to invest­ig­ate. Once there, the clues and the ques­tions start pil­ing up as she meets up with loc­al journ­al­ist Emmanuel (Jacky Ido) to track down the mys­ter­i­ous South African mer­cen­ary Pieter Bello (Bart Fouche) who has shown up too many times in this story to be a coincidence.

There’s an awful lot of plot in The Widow which is good because that is the show’s strength. If you like twists, cliff­hangers and action, I think you will enjoy it.

There are quite a few shows and films that appeared on plat­forms before stream­ing really took hold, and it’s a shame that those com­pan­ies don’t feel a need to resur­face them occa­sion­ally. I mean, they spent so much money on them!

Where to watch The Widow

Worldwide: Streaming on Prime Video