DOMESTIC DISTURBANCE

How a soapy strain of thriller became the defining metaphor of our time

- BY JUDY BERMAN

A WOMAN SEEMS TO HAVE THE PERFECT LIFE. She looks like Robin Wright or Meghann Fahy or, remarkably often, Nicole Kidman. Her career, if she has one, is creative or philanthropic. Her blue-blooded husband is a silver fox (Hugh Grant) or an Adonis (Alexander Skarsgard). They have a cute kid or two. And whether they reside in a chic suburb, a beachfront mansion, or a city loft, their kitchen is sure to have the most majestic island you’ve ever seen.

Then comes the crisis. The woman is assaulted. The husband is cheating. A child disappears. A suspicious stranger arrives. Someone gets murdered. That perfect life becomes a nightmare, or is revealed to have been one all along.

These are the contours of the contemporary domestic thriller, a niche that has come to dominate every form of narrative entertainment by, for, and about women. At first, its proliferation seemed a typical case of Hollywood copycatting; Big Little Lies becomes a smash, wins Emmys, begets flimsy imitations that lots of people watch anyway. But at this point, the trend’s persistence suggests a more profound connection between these stories and their audience. Domestic thrillers have always existed because women’s fears of patriarchal violence and control, particularly in the supposed sanctuary of the home, spring eternal. Certainly, American life has given us many new causes for worry.

Yet the domestic thriller is no longer just a fever dream of gender anxiety. These are stories of an enemy infiltrating intimate spaces: a husband, a neighbor, a nanny—people who are supposed to be safe but are actually dangerous, communities fractured along invisible rifts. These literal houses divided against themselves have broad resonance in a paranoid society in the throes of what the journalist Jeff Sharlet calls a “slow civil war.” Just as slowly, the domestic thriller has become the defining metaphor of our time.