In the new FX drama The Veil, a colleague of British spy Imogen Salter pleads with her to change strategy on a new undercover assignment. “Please don’t speak to the real me,” she replies. “It is extremely unhelpful.”
The Veil repeatedly tries to figure out where the line exists between this persona and the real her, whose name isn’t even Imogen. The problem is that the version of the series about “Imogen” is vastly more entertaining, but the show mostly seems interested in her true identity.
Created by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders, All the Light We Cannot See), The Veil introduces us to our heroine, played by the great Elisabeth Moss, at the end of another assignment, where she went by Portia. The prior job done, she’s granted this new moniker and sent to a UN refugee camp on the Turkey/Syria border, where a woman called Adilah (Yumna Marwan) has been accused of being an ISIS operative hiding among the camp’s displaced widows and children. Working on behalf of a joint Anglo-French operation, with French spy Malik (Dali Benssalah) as her handler, Imogen’s job is to figure out if Adilah is the monster everyone claims she is, and, if so, whether she can provide intel to prevent a rumored terrorist attack on a Western city.
This seems like a fairly straightforward idea. The parts of The Veil that are just Imogen kicking ass, taking names, and smiling mischievously are pretty thrilling, and an intriguing change of pace for Moss, whose recent work (The Handmaid’s Tale, Shining Girls, The Invisible Man), while excellent, has almost entirely cast her as traumatized women who rise up against their abusers.
But Knight and his collaborators (Shining Girls alum Daina Reid directed the first three episodes, Damon Thomas the last three) are, like our heroine with her multiple Shakespearean aliases, the kind that only see that approach as a means to an end. The case instead turns out to be the key to unlocking the many secrets that Imogen keeps from the world, and ones that the world has kept from Imogen. But the more The Veil explores her tragic backstory — and the more it attempts to play the game of We’re Not So Different, You And I between Imogen and Adilah — the more impenetrable it becomes, in both plot and emotion. The climax of the sixth and final episode (featuring James Purefoy as a mysterious figure from Imogen’s past) is almost entirely gibberish, with characters making huge decisions seemingly at random.
There’s just enough of the more superficial approach to the story to wish that it was the real Veil, rather than a cover identity for the story Knight wanted to tell. With pale blonde hair, striking red lipstick, and a variety of excellent coats and jackets, Moss has never looked as effortlessly cool on screen as she does here, and has rarely seemed as confident. When she’s running circles around her French and American counterparts — including Josh Charles, perfectly cast as a smug CIA agent who keeps trying to bigfoot the case — taking on multiple attackers on her own, and grinning at every turn like the cat who ate the canary, The Veil feels both very entertaining and durable.
It’s not hard to envision Moss periodically returning to that take on the character every few years, as a palate cleanser in between roles where she has to psychologically destroy herself and/or the audience. Instead, The Veil quickly turns into another of those kinds of assignments, but isn’t nearly as good at it as so many of her previous ones.
The first two episodes of The Veil are now streaming on Hulu, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all six.
