Something to watch tonight: Thursday 26 September

The Widow (Williams, 2019)

First of all apologies for missing our appointment yesterday. I have been having some annoying problems with the laptop – slowly getting worse so they had to be attended to – and ended up spending several hours in a chat session with Apple yesterday afternoon and then over an hour on the phone with a senior Helpdesk person in Sydney.

Despite being super-helpful, they weren’t actually able to solve the problem so I am limping along for a while and as soon as I click ‘send’ on this edition, I’ll be attempting a full restore from one of last week’s Time Machine backups. Wish me luck!

The whole business has made a mess of my plans for this week.

It only came out in mid-2019, but so much has happened since then that The Widow has simply disappeared from consciousness. It certainly disappeared from mine. To my surprise, looking back through old RNZ Widescreen reviews, there it was.

Ah, that’s right, I thought, I vaguely recall quite liking that.

And evidently we did:

Action star Kate Beckinsale (the Underworld franchise) is the lead. She plays Georgia, a recently widowed former Captain in the British Army, tending her emotional wounds at her family’s cottage in the Welsh mountains. Her husband Will was an aid worker who died in a plane crash in the Democratic Republic of Congo so imagine her surprise when she she sees him on television, during the coverage of a riot in the DRC’s capital of Kinshasa.

Against the advice of family friend (and former Military Intelligence chief) Charles Dance, she hops on a plane to investigate. Once there, the clues and the questions start piling up as she meets up with local journalist Emmanuel (Jacky Ido) to track down the mysterious South African mercenary Pieter Bello (Bart Fouche) who has shown up too many times in this story to be a coincidence.

There’s an awful lot of plot in The Widow which is good because that is the show’s strength. If you like twists, cliffhangers and action, I think you will enjoy it.

There are quite a few shows and films that appeared on platforms before streaming really took hold, and it’s a shame that those companies don’t feel a need to resurface them occasionally. I mean, they spent so much money on them!

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Where to watch The Widow

Worldwide: Streaming on Prime Video