REVIEW: ’56 Days’ Is Convoluted As Hell But Chemistry Sells

Adapted from Catherine Ryan Howard’s best-selling novel of the same name, 56 Days is Prime Video’s attempt at an erotic thriller. From creators and executive producers Lisa Zwerling and Karyn Usher, the series embraces mess and mystery in equal measure.

56 Days follows Oliver (Avan Jogia) and Ciara (Dove Cameron), who, after meeting randomly in a supermarket, fall for each other immediately. Only, the series starts 56 days later when homicide investigators arrive at Oliver’s apartment to find an unidentified body, brutally murdered and intentionally decomposed in the tub.

Told through a non-linear narrative, the series puts the audience in the shoes of the investigators. Did Oliver kill the person? Is the person a woman or a man? Who is the woman living in Oliver’s apartment? Is it her in the tub?

As we start to see what led to the body in the tub, all roads lead back to an intense single day for the investigation, splicing past into the present and uncovering answers along the way. While the nonlinear structure presents an interesting narrative take, the lack of cohesion between each of the elements presented in the episodes starts to become more convoluted than mysterious. 

Prime Video’s 56 Days is a messy erotic thriller, and that’s the selling point.

The reality is that 56 Days is barely coherent, and it buckles under the convoluted twists, but sex sells. With so few erotic thrillers, this Prime Video original melodrama stands out, and for fans of messy, well, it delivers in spades.

In fact, 56 Days is actually more charming because of its warts. It’s not prim or proper, and the winding, resentful love story we see before us runs against a “who was killed?” mystery in a way that embraces chaos, leaving me feeling more taken away by the show than taken aback. 

56 Days embraces messiness for every character. Whether it’s the implications that the man who looked out for Oliver did so because he loved his father in a romantic way, the cop finding a situation with a criminal, or the fact that Ciera is on a crazed but methodical revenge mission. Add in a dash of “is Oliver a sociopath?” or not, and the series doesn’t stop trying to titillate. 

Like a good Mexican telenovela, 56 Days is trying to titilate.

Similar to the duplicity and plotting of Netflix’s Remarriage and Desires, 56 Days is an original series barrelling toward problematic over and over again in a way that never makes you turn it off. The more missteps the narrative makes, the more layers of convoluted exposition are added, but I still couldn’t look away.

Like a car wreck on a freeway, 56 Days will make everyone rubberneck. They may not love it or see it as prestige television, but you can not say it is boring. The grim curiosity you have to find out the person who was murdered and why keeps you dialed in, even when the mess starts to pile up higher and higher. But that’s what makes trashy TV such a guilty pleasure. 

While I fully acknowledge how backhanded much of my praise may seem, it’s important to understand that I am a woman raised by Mexican telenovelas, by a secret evil twin emerging to backstab a wife or convoluted sexy revenge plots when a woman is tired of being a mistress. I was raised by mess, and 56 Days hits a height that has been missing from television for some time now. 

Incoherent at times, the messy romance and danger are hard to ignore.

Still, the reason it works is that every actor involved delivers an earnest performance and delivers some of the most insane dialogue I’ve seen in the past few years with absolute sincerity. They are acting as much as they can, and I am seated, asking for more. 

Ciera is cold and calculating until she isn’t. There is an adolescent yearning for love that Ciera exhibits, balancing it against the need for revenge. The important part of Ciera’s character isn’t that she is detached from everyone who isn’t her family or Ciera. That honor goes to her deep need to consistently be on top. 

Ciera always has to be right. She has to control every situation, and more markedly, she has to be the smartest person in any room that she walks into. The way that Ciera manipulates the world around her, curating it for Oliver’s pleasure and her own success, stands out. Her confidence is the highest among all characters, and so is her dedication to her goal. 

Oliver, on the other hand, is absolutely and without any shadow of a doubt pathetic. He has shrunk in stature, trying to live beneath the world instead of in it, destined to pay for a mistake he made when he was a teen until he dies. Oliver is manipulated by his therapist, his girlfriends, and everyone else. He is a vision of a pathetic man grasping for control and meaning, and it’s what makes his inability to see Ciera’s malice so endearing. 

Dove Cameron and Avan Jogia sell every last ounce of 56 Days’ messy plot, and you can’t look away.

Even at his worst, it’s hard not want to protect him. Oliver is living in a world that has been manipulated to suit other people, taking a teenage mistake and casting him as an unrepentant danger to the public for the rest of his life because of it. Pairing together someone so self-assured and someone so pathetic just makes for good television. 

56 Days isn’t good, but it is engaging, with performances that pique curiosity and an electric chemistry between the characters that makes you keep pressing play on the next episode. If you love telenovelas and unhinged approaches to mystery, well, look no further than this borderline erotic mystery thriller from Prime Video. Just prepare for mess.

56 Days is streaming now, exclusively on Prime Video.