Just because a TV show is thematically dark doesn’t mean it has to be incomprehensibly opaque, and yet Black Rabbit takes murkiness to a vexing extreme—a situation that also plagued star/director Jason Bateman’s prior Ozark.
Whereas visual obscurity felt like an apt expression of that prior series’ bleak amorality, however, it resonates mainly as an affectation in Zach Baylin and Kate Susman’s eight-part Netflix thriller, premiering Sept. 18. It’s an exasperating one at that, considering that in most other respects, this tale of siblings caught in a lethal web of their own making is a gripping saga of loyalty and self-destructiveness that’s elevated by riveting performances from Bateman and Jude Law. Be prepared to turn your television’s brightness settings way up.
After years of working his tail off at his Brooklyn Bridge-nestled joint the Black Rabbit, hotshot New York City restaurateur Jake (Law) wants to move up in the world. His ticket to the big-time is the Four Seasons’ Pool Room, and to punch it, he needs to earn a rave review from The New York Times critic who’s scheduled to make her third visit to his establishment.
That’s complicated by the sudden disappearance of his star bartender Anna (Abbey Lee) as well as the reappearance of his brother Vince (Bateman), who used to co-own the Black Rabbit until he was pushed out by Jake and his business cohort Naveen (Amir Malaklou) over the worst of his many misdeeds.
With long messy hair and a beard to match, Vince looks like the definition of trouble, and though he was the creative force behind the Black Rabbit—as well as the rock band that initially made him and Jake famous—he returns to the Big Apple in shambles following a rare coin sale that ended in theft and murder.
Everyone knows that Vince is bad news, including Jake. He can’t stop himself, though, from giving his older brother another chance. Part of this is because Anna has flaked and he needs help at the Black Rabbit, but it’s mainly due to him being an incorrigible sucker for his sibling.
Vince makes false promises to Jake about being on the straight-and-narrow and almost immediately proves himself a liar, since he’s in hock (to the tune of $140,000) to Junior (Forrest Weber) and Babbit (Chris Coy), two mid-level gangsters who answer to Junior’s ruthless kingpin dad Joe (Troy Kotsur).
Fortunately for Vince, Jake is about to sell their mother’s house, and the proceeds should cover his deep debts. As is often the case with ne’er-do-wells, however, Vince doesn’t make anything easy, and Bateman casts him as an arrogant lout—whose vices include drinking, drugs, gambling, and homicide—who’s always playing the angles to his own benefit, damn the damage he causes to everyone else.
Vince is a hustler, and while Black Rabbit initially plays as something of a Bloodline-esque tale of a wayward brother returning home to wreak havoc, it slowly reveals Law’s Jake to be far from squeaky clean. Rumors of sexual misconduct at the Black Rabbit swirl around him, and despite his devotion to son Hunter (Michael Cash) and ex-wife Val (Dagmara Domińczyk), he too appears to be skirting the rules, all in a desperate attempt to pull himself up the entrepreneurial ladder.
Making Jake’s life messier, his Pool Room ambitions lead to friction between his interior designer Estelle (Cleopatra Coleman) and her beau (and his best friend), music star and Black Rabbit investor Wes (Sope Dirisu). Furthermore, his celebrated chef Roxie (Amaka Okafor) is worried that he’s in over his head, motivating her to start making self-serving contingency plans.
And then there’s Vince, a walking catastrophe who begins scheming this way and that to get himself out of the hole with Junior and Babbit, including by turning to his old unsavory buddy Matt (Don Harvey). Black Rabbit opens with a potentially deadly heist before flashing back one month to the lead up to this calamity, and it quickly throws more problems into its volatile mix, including rapey art dealer Jules (John Ales) and his “people pleaser” fixer Campbell (Morgan Spector), who’s been tasked with making sure his client stays out of prison.
Baylin and Susman’s story is wound tightly and intricately, and at the center of it is Bateman and Law, who don’t resemble each other in the slightest but share a convincingly fraught bond rooted in affection and frustration. Law’s sweaty, phony striver is a natural complement to Bateman’s ramshackle sleazeball, and together, their loving hostility infuses the material with high-wire anxiety and animosity.
In just about every respect, Black Rabbit (whose episodes are additionally directed by Laura Linney, Ben Semanoff, and Justin Kurzel, who helmed the Law-headlined The Order, written by Baylin) is complex and compelling. Consequently, its decision to drench itself in gloomy darkness is enough to make one pull out their hair—or, at least, to give one a headache from all the squinting required to decipher what’s taking place on screen.
Netflix shows are notorious for subpar low-key lighting and color grading, and Baylin and Susman’s might be the most egregious culprit to date, its palette so muted and its shadows so dense that it seems like it’s actively trying to conceal its action. Dour aesthetics make sense for a tale about brotherhood, betrayal, and the unhealthy ties that bind, but the series goes overboard with the literal grimness, little of which is offset by a score full of indie rock tunes by Interpol and The Strokes.
Still, when its drama is visible, the show buzzes with scuzzy tension. Jake and Vince’s relationship is a case study in toxic sibling devotion, and Law and Bateman’s portrait of their characters’ co-dependence (which at one point is accurately described as “addiction”) is believably dysfunctional and deep.
Their raw rapport is the heart of a story that expands outward in various directions—eventually coming to involve Vince’s estranged tattoo-artist daughter Gen (Odessa Young) and nosey Detective Seung (Hettienne Park)—without losing sight of its twin axes.
“Unfortunately for us, we don’t choose our own families,” says Joe, whose offspring is a kindred spirit to Jake’s bro. Yet as Black Rabbit ultimately suggests, sometimes the ones we get are what we deserve—and aren’t as irredeemable as we think.
