The Tourist

I've noticed that The Tourist has been on Netflix's Top 10 since it came out earlier this year. The first season originally came out in the U. K. in 2022 where it was the most watched show of the year there too. I finally got around to watching it and have to say I really enjoyed it. It does start a little slow in the first episode so you might feel like giving up but don't, stick with it because it's worth it. It really picks up about midway through the second episode. All the actors give really good performances, especially Jamie Dornan. They really pull you into their world to the point where you really start to care about their characters and what happens to them. I really couldn't wait to find out more and more about Dornan's identity.

A man (Jamie Dornan) is run off the road by a tanker truck in the Australian outback. He wakes up in the hospital with full blown amnesia. He doesn't even know his name. New cop Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald) doggedly investigates.

Jamie Dornan may be the big name of this series, but it's Danielle Macdonald that I find more compelling. She has a great sweetness to her acting. She's basically the cop in Fargo except not pregnant. This show does try to do some comedy mostly through characters like Ethan. It is not my favorite aspect of the show. This lasted two seasons with specific stories for each.

I found that The Tourist is even more entertaining than people were saying it was. The Tourists follows an unnamed man (Jaime Dornan) who loses his memory after a car accident. We literally know nothing about him or the story. He wakes up in a hospital with no memory of who he was or what he did. All he has is a note to go to a diner at a specific time but as soon as he leaves the hospital there are people trying to kill him. From there he needs to find out who he is and what he did for people to want to kill him before it's too late. Jaime Dornan looks like he's on the verge of becoming a pretty big star. There are only two seasons at only six episodes apiece so it's an easy binge.

The Australian Outback is another world..lonely, desolate and mind-numbing.

So when a sophisticated Irishman wakes up with no memory of who he is or his past, the endless expanse ironically imprisons him together with the locals who are either naive and innocent or who know more about his past.

Even the secondary characters highlight what living and working in such remote isolation can do to the human psyche..it's hard not to go crazy from nothing to do and nothing to see.

The landscape itself is a key character...passive and active at the same time.

But it has all the ingredients of an Australian mystery..dark, raw, and the right dose of dry humour.

I do not want want to go into serious details about this, mostly because it just hitting the 8 out of 10 mark for me with basically everything. Story, script, acting, dialogues, camerawork, score, all making it way above average. However, the female lead, the policewoman Danielle Macdonald, is a revelation. She manages to be extremely cute and horribly annoying at the same time. In that case, I reckon, I also have to give credit to the director. The conclusion of the story is profoundly shocking. What a ride!