56 Days: The Rules of Deception, Between Sex and Mysteries

Boston police are called to a luxurious city building to shed light on the discovery of a corpse, so decomposed that the victim cannot be identified: dissolved in a bathtub, only the skeleton remains. But precisely, who is the victim? The audience will find out thanks to the narrative "device" that takes us back in time, starting exactly from those 56 days before that also give the series its title.

We thus meet Oliver Kennedy and Ciara Wyse, who meet seemingly by chance in a supermarket. He is a wealthy architect who lives in the apartment that will one day become the aforementioned crime scene. She, with doe eyes and a slender physique, works in the IT sector and lives in a rundown shack on the outskirts. Oliver is immediately smitten, and a passionate relationship begins between the two, to the point that the girl moves into his house. But both hide something from the other, and the secrets they conceal risk inevitably complicating things...

From Paper to the (Small) Screen

Catherine Ryan Howard had published the eponymous novel – published in Italy by Fazi Editore in the Darkside series – in 2021, and the original setting in Dublin during the Covid lockdown period had provided a plausible justification for the couple moving in together in such a short span of time. Here, however, there are some forced elements in the immediate cohabitation, which, moreover, go hand in hand with the whims of a script that often forces its hand and unnecessarily drags things out.

As on many other recent occasions, 56 Days wastes eight episodes – for a total duration that easily exceeds six hours – to stage what could have been told in a two-hour film or a little more. It's obvious that in this way the tension is diluted, and even the management of the various plot twists is relatively predictable, without real crescendos and with the inevitable "explanation" episode accompanying us to that distant past, to the day where it all began. 

And so, if the series pulsates with energy, it is almost solely thanks to the performance of its protagonist Dove Cameron – former Disney Channel star here in her first significant dramatic and adult role – whose ambiguous and magnetic gaze offers remarkable points of fascination, and not only for the probably captivated male audience. A calculating and manipulative figure, which goes hand in hand with the mystery behind the identity of the other main figure, played by Canadian actor Avan Jogia, who is precisely the custodian of that key mystery buried in time.

An Unbalanced Narrative Management

Despite the title, which seems to recall the cult Polish production 365 Days (2020) and hint at a potential surge of eroticism between the two, 56 Days does not exaggerate the sex scenes, although they are present but limited particularly to the first part of the season, also due to the lack of chemistry under the sheets between the performers. The script then runs parallel to the events of detectives Karl Connolly and Lee Reardon – played respectively by Dorian Missick and Karla Souza – called to investigate the murder case in the present. The narrative lives on this continuous and insistent alternation between before and after, hoping to progressively reveal the cards available and keep the viewer's curiosity high.

The main problem is that even when the truth of how things really happened and the motivations driving the characters are revealed, there is very little that is interesting and plausible. The series does not carry deep meanings or morals of any kind, but only enjoyable yet content-empty entertainment; an emptiness that also affects the characterizations of the protagonists themselves, for whom a vain attempt at psychological depth is not enough to be more than archetypal caricatures, albeit fascinating, as mentioned in Ciara's case.