Review: Elisabeth Moss stars as a spy gone rogue in The Veil
Elisabeth Moss has acted in more projects than you can remember for more years than you might guess, but it was Mad Men in 2007 that made her the reason to watch a show — an impression cemented by Top of the Lake and taken for granted by the time of The Handmaid’s Tale.
In The Veil, created by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders) and streaming on Disney+, the camera makes a habit of looking straight at her face, submitting you to her penetrating gaze.
Moss plays MI6 agent Imogen Salter, which we understand immediately is just her latest nom d’espionnage. She turns up incognito at a snowy UN refugee camp at the Syrian-Turkish border, where a young woman, Adilah El Idrissi (Yumna Marwan), has been taken into protective custody after having
nearly been lynched by a mob that believes her to be Sabaine al Kubaisi, an upper-level Islamic State commander, “the most wanted woman in the world.”
Imogen has come to the camp to find out what Adilah, or Sabaine, might know about a rumoured big terrorist attack on a Western target, and spirits her away. Owing in no small part to Marwan’s deep soulfulness, our sympathy at first runs to Adilah, a lone, broken figure hoping only to get back to her 10-year-old daughter in Paris.
She at least seems to be telling the truth, whereas Imogen, who represents powerful government institutions, professionally lies all the time. “Even though we’re lying to each other, I feel like I’ve been more honest with her than most people,” Imogen will tell French agent Malik Amar (Dali Benssalah), her contact and more-or-less boyfriend, in regard to Adilah.
Imogen can seem a little mad; she has a habit of smiling at odd times, making it difficult to know exactly what’s going on in there. We can infer from her smoking and drinking that she’s an unsettled sort of person, and we’re fed morsels of an origin story to suggest unresolved trauma.
In the end — near the beginning, actually — Imogen will go rogue, setting herself against her superiors and protecting (and interrogating) Adilah as they travel from Syria to Istanbul to Paris and England.
It’s a road movie, basically, one of those in which strangers thrown together become less strange to one another. As a spy story, it’s a decent example of its kind, but as a dramatic twohander, fuelled by subtle performances from Moss and Marwan, it’s pretty terrific.
Josh Charles plays CIA agent Max Peterson, a caricature of U.S. bluster, impatience, selfapproval and Francophobia, sent to Paris to hijack the investigation from French intelligence.
Described by Malik’s superior, Magritte (the august Thibault de Montalembert, who recently provided similar service in Franklin), as “the most American American America has ever produced,” Max isn’t out of the airport before he’s actually tussling with Malik. Their butting-stags competitive relationship is as close to comic relief as The Veil will come.
Terrorism, as depicted onscreen, is a tired and tricky theme, subject to cultural stereotype. Accordingly, Knight has left the composition of his malefactors — not even ISIS (that is, Islamic State) but “a breakaway ISIS cell,” a marginal marginal group — a little vague, and painted sides in a variety of ethnicities. But terrorism is a device here, not a subject.
If it’s not always clear in the moment who is shooting at whom or why, whenever the script ignites a fight or a gunfight or a chase or an escape, there’s no question whom to root for — both Imogen and Adilah. Asked to choose between them, one simply suspends judgment, hoping, as with any troubled couple, that things will work out well. Though all six episodes were sent to reviewers, only the first four were allowed to be reviewed, so you will have to see and decide for yourself.