Not Without My Husband
Series Review: “The Widow”
A grief stricken woman journeys into the Congo’s violent and corrupt underworld to get some answers on her missing husband, who was pronounced dead three years earlier. She’s not buying it.
SnapShot Plot
As if Kate Beckinsale needed to prove she’s capable of handling herself among aristocrats in English drawing rooms as well as wielding an automatic weapon in the wilds of Africa’s Congo, here we have The Widow. This 8-part series is told exclusively through the eyes of Beckinsale’s character, Georgia Wells, a no-nonsense and stubborn woman whose impressive degree of self-restraint and guts nonetheless allows the palpable emotions of grief and longing to come shining through. For three years, Georgia has been a woman haunted by sadness and doubt over the loss of her beloved husband, Will, a medical aid doctor whose passenger jet went down and from which there were no survivors. Problem is, Will’s remains were never identified in the wreckage. Years later, Georgia’s nagging doubt becomes a full-blown obsession when she happens to see news footage of a street riot in (Congo’s capital city) Kinshasa in which she spots a man in the crowd who she’s convinced is her ‘dead’ husband.
Boots on the ground, Georgia enlists the help of Will’s old boss, Judith Gray (in a captivating performance by the fine Alex Kingston) as well as a Congolese man named Emmanuel whose wife perished on the same flight. As soon as she scratches below the surface, Georgia discovers more questions than answers, and a mysterious web of corruption which extends in shocking directions. It’s soon apparent that there are many people who will do anything to stop her investigation, and the longer Georgia persists in her efforts the more people’s lives she will put at risk. Is it all worth it?
Parting Shot
The Widow was created and scripted by brothers, Harry and Jack Williams, and is presently airing on both British ITV and Amazon Prime. Directed by Sam Donovan and Olly Blackburn, this is a poignant story about the 3Gs of Grief, Greed and Guilt. To a one, each character is tortured by at least one of these core emotions. And they prove the driving forces behind actions which — under normal circumstances — would never be attributed to them, ever. Indeed it seems to be the seething backdrop of the Congo itself, baking all who exist under the searing rays of its inexorable sun, into wilder and more desperately distilled versions of themselves. In the end, however, this is a story about silver linings, and the surprising bonds mined out of the ground and forged in loss, crystallized into new definitions of Family where before there was only devastation.
The Widow is presently streaming on Amazon Prime.
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