film / tv / celeb / substack / news / social media / pajiba love / about / cbr
film / tv / politics / news / celeb

Review: Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw's Immensely Satisfying Netflix Spy Thriller 'Black Doves'

By Chris Revelle | TV | December 9, 2024 |

Black Doves Helen Sam Kiera Knightley Ben Whishaw Netflix.jpg
Header Image Source: Netflix

Spy thrillers have enjoyed a high season over the past few years. Last year, Mr. & Mrs. Smith was the sleek new hotness with its chic fits and relationship-gripes-mapped-onto-spies plotting. This winter, we have The Agency featuring Michael Fassbender’s serious grimace and Netflix’s Black Doves with its droll English espionage during Christmas time to make our holiday season as full of skullduggery as possible. It’s worth wondering what makes spy thrillers so attractive and why audiences crave them so much at this particular moment in time. All these series attempt to balance some level of character depth with the fizzy fun of cinematic spycraft to varying levels of success and Black Doves in particular nails the mix. With its compelling emotional arcs and flair for darkly funny romps, Black Doves demonstrates why spy fiction is so satisfying.


Black Doves tells the intertwined stories of Helen Webb (Kiera Knightley) and Sam Young (Ben Whishaw). Helen is a black dove, a deep (deep, deep, deep) undercover spy who’s married to the defense minister and feeds state secrets back to her handler Reed (Sarah Lancashire), who represents a shadowy agency that sells those secrets to the highest bidder. Sam is a triggerman, a professional assassin who retired after some mysterious tragedy but was pulled back into the game to protect Helen. Helen has stepped into some deep shit that could seriously upend her position as her agency’s strongest asset in the British government and so Reed has called Sam back to protect her. Through flashbacks, we come to understand that Sam and Helen were partners and fast friends who came to genuinely care for one another in the otherwise unsentimental world of espionage. Sam shares his budding relationship with a man named Michael, and Helen shares her mixed emotions about marrying and having children with a man who’s as much her long-term mark as he is her husband and father to her kids. In flashbacks and the events of the series, Knightley and Whishaw display fantastic chemistry. Their friendship supplies a great deal of the darkly funny moments that thread through the story and keep the strong emotional core intact through all the bullets, explosions, and professional lying. Nothing like hearing, “Hello darling” after blowing someone away with a shotgun.


The great balance between comedy and compelling drama is one thing that makes Black Doves such a fun watch, but it has some other tricks up its sleeve. Black Doves seems to understand the secret behind great spy fiction: audiences want to see order behind the chaos. Especially in times of uncertainty and mayhem, the notions of conspiracies and powers in movement can feel strangely comforting. It’s one of the things that makes conspiracy theories attractive; the notion that despite how chaotic and out of control things feel, it’s all going to someone’s plan. In this way, spy thrillers are a fantasy about order and control, which feels understandably comforting when the world feels like it’s going nuts. It feels good to see Helen and Sam smirk and crack jokes in between knife fights because gallows humor feels less vulnerable than being unnerved or afraid. Spy fiction can provide ironic remove and emotional distance from the scary stuff, allowing us to experience it vicariously through unruffled agents. It’s entirely unlikely that any real-world version of these spies and killers are half as blithe or snappy, but that’s part of the comforting emotional distance spy thrillers can offer.


Black Doves also offers a supporting cast of underworld characters like the imperious Reed to whom Lancashire imparts a wonderful iciness or the divine Kathryn Hunter’s Lenny, a hitman maven with a whiskey-and-cigarettes rasp and a grim devotion to criminal codes of conduct. Along with a rotating cast of drug pushers and scrappy hitmen, Black Doves presents a fun, imaginative, and slightly wacky John Wick-style underworld to play in. The heightened darkly comic tone allows all of this to feel fun instead of scary because it’s so unreal. The series understands that great spy thrillers balance the light and the dark in a way that makes the otherwise unsettling feel like a fun thrill ride. Could it be that in this time of uncertainty and strife where governments across the globe turn towards fascism and oppression strengthens the audience’s desire for spy fiction? I think so. I think that when it all feels too monolithic, overwhelming, and scary, it’s a balm to see characters with battered, but ultimately intact senses of justice fight, quip, and scheme through international chaos.

Black Doves doesn’t reinvent the spy fiction wheel, but it creates the ideal thriller for viewers to have fun and perhaps approach some of their real-world agita in a low-stakes way. We live in darkening times where through organized guile and pure chaos, our world is struggling. Black Doves offers a little relief with a fantasy where no matter how scary things are, answers lie just on the other side of the silencer and a dry quip.