If you’re someone who has ever been scrolling through social media and been totally creeped out after realizing, “Wait, why am I seeing a targeted ad for this random thing I was just thinking about?” then you might want to prepare yourself before watching Chloe, the fantastic new series out Friday on Amazon Prime.
It will prove very disturbing for you—hell, it made me paranoid, and I know how algorithms work! (Well, mostly.) But if you’re looking for a whip-smart original thriller with equal parts emotion and email, heart and hard drive, you’ve found your first official summer obsession.
The six-episode limited series, which originally aired on the BBC earlier this year, wants to freak you out. It wants to remind you just how deeply ingrained social media has become in our day-to-day lives and how terrifying that reality is. And it does that by becoming the one thing that you can watch on your couch this summer that will actively make you want to throw your phone out the window.
Chloe stars Erin Doherty as Becky, a reserved, middle-class twentysomething who spends her life scrolling through her various accounts over the breakfast table (freaky levels of relatable already). Becky is particularly enamored with the social accounts of Chloe (Poppy Gilbert), an always-smiling, posh socialite who seems to have it all.
When Becky’s not wearing out her thumbs on a phone screen, she’s taking advantage of the access that her temp agency gig allows her to get a little taste of the good life herself. Becky worms her way into events using fake names, false careers, and invitations meant for someone else. (Anna Delvey is shook.)
But for Becky, this is all in good fun. Why shouldn’t she get to have something more, even if it’s only for a night? After all, her life is hard enough as it is. When she’s not out temping, she’s at home helping to take care of her mother, Pam, who has early-onset dementia. Becky’s relationship with her mother oscillates between sweet and strained as Pam fades in and out of the current moment, and Becky longs to liven up the rut that her life has fallen into.
One morning, over a spoonful of cereal, Becky scrolls past a mysterious post on Chloe’s social media, quoting the infamous lyric from The Smiths, “To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die.” Becky suspects something is amiss, as would anyone—no one can still be that obsessed with (500) Days of Summer in 2022, right? Grieving comments from friends underneath the post indicate that Chloe has died, apparently by suicide. Becky sees this as an opportunity to use her gift of grift to infiltrate Chloe’s circle to find out more.
Now is when you’ll want to set your social accounts to private, or maybe just delete them altogether. Scrub any trace of yourself from the internet. Go off the grid entirely, because Chloe is going to show you just how easy it is to permeate someone else’s inner circle with just a few easy steps.
Using methods that anyone with some wit and a penchant for nosiness could figure out, Becky stakes out Chloe’s funeral, uses her temp gig connections to get into some swanky events, crashes yoga with Chloe’s best friend under the alias “Sasha,” and is sat at a dinner table with a dead girl’s entire friend group, all before the end of the first episode.
But… surprise! Chloe’s life was certainly not as picture-perfect as social media made it out to be, a fact Becky soon discovers as she becomes obsessed with trying to figure out the murky details of Chloe’s death. When it’s revealed that the final two calls on Chloe’s cellphone were to Becky, we realize that her connection to her Instagram obsession may be less tenuous than we thought. And if Chloe’s friends find out that their new pal isn’t who she says she is, the precarious house of cards Becky has built atop Chloe’s tombstone could give at any moment.
Although Becky has set a trap that seems inescapable, Chloe itself avoids getting too tangled in its own world wide web of lies. Erin Doherty makes all of Becky’s subterfuge look like second nature, effortlessly throwing out lie after lie with enough calm conviction to power down a polygraph.
A character like hers, one who is manipulative and cunning without a second thought, could so easily become unlikable, but Doherty never is. She lends a thoughtfulness to Becky—as calculating as she is, she’s never cold. Doherty understands that Becky is someone who ultimately just wants to be seen, and her performance allows Becky the grace to make that happen.
A major part of that is owed to the depiction of Becky’s relationship with her mother. Becky is finally out and making a life for herself in the world, albeit a completely fake one, and her longer absences take a toll on her mother’s delicate state. Becky sincerely wants to be there for her mother, but also holds onto resentment over a difficult childhood. Lisa Palfrey, who plays Pam, so perfectly embodies the demeanor of her illness—in one moment, she can fade the warmth from her eyes to convey the loss of a moment of memory.
It’s a difficult watch, especially for anyone who has had a loved one suffer from the same sickness, but it never feels false. In their tender moments, Doherty and Palfrey have radiant chemistry. Their features meld so softly with one another when they peer face to face, I believed they really did have a whole life of memories to keep clutched in their hands as long as they possibly could.
When you’re finished crying at that, you’re liable to be thrust back into a world of anxiety as Becky retreats into Chloe’s inner life. Becky’s ability to fib with a straight face builds an enormous—and precarious—structure of deception that could collapse at any second.
Every lie Becky tells, every amount of money she’s loaned, and every fake name she gives was enough to steal a little bit of breath from me until I realized I hadn’t taken a full inhale from the moment the episode started until the credits rolled. There’s nothing like a good, mid-budget summertime popcorn thriller—an art form that has been all but lost with the influx of multi-billion dollar comic book franchises—and Chloe is here to revitalize the genre.
And that’s not to say that every moment is an edge-of-your-seat rollercoaster ride. Quite the opposite, actually. Chloe’s strengths lie in its ability to creep up on you, to stay with you long after the final episode is over. We all know that Instagram is a lie. It’s a place where we manufacture a version of ourselves that we want the world to see, the one who doesn’t sleep in until 3 pm on the weekends or eat cheese puffs for dinner. But Chloe is so strong that it makes you peer even deeper into that artifice, wondering just how easy it might be to tip the scale fully and become a pathological liar all the time, not just online.
In contrast to the influx of last spring’s true-crime scammer shows, Chloe actually explores the intentions of the grifter as its heart instead of just portraying the fun of the facade. Think more The Dropout and less Inventing Anna; it doesn’t want to just show how easy it is to lie but rather examine all of the reasons that we do it: for thrill, for escape, for closure.
Chloe earns all six hours of its expertly crafted mystery. But how ironic that the first thing I wanted to do after watching it was post about it online.
