The Power, Amazon Prime Video review: dystopia gets an electrifying feminist spin
Doom and gloom is big business in the literary world. Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy and Suzanne Collins have all made their millions predicting humanity’s dire future. Naomi Alderman’s 2016 novel The Power scooped the Women’s Prize for Fiction with what, at first glance, seemed to be much of the same dystopian despair.
But it had a twist: for once, women weren’t left at the bottom of the scrapheap, set for a life of systemic rape or torture. Instead, teenage girls woke up one day with the ability to zap electricity from their fingertips, and a new, matriarchal world order was born.
If it sounds like the stuff of prepubescent dreams, it isn’t. In America, misogynistic YouTubers plot revenge; a gangster’s daughter in London is overwhelmed both by her abilities and grief; over in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, women and girls who possess the “power” are met with tanks in the street; from within the walls of a Moldovan government fortress, a vicious civil war is brewing.
Throughout the first three episodes of Prime Video’s high-budget adaptation, we’re introduced to the women and girls grappling with the magnitude of their newfound powers. We first meet Allie (Halle Bush), a troubled American foster kid who is tormented by voices and ends up hiding out at a religious convent. Then there’s gobby Cockney Roxy – played by Three Girls’ Ria Zmitrowicz, she brings much of the harrowing defiance that anchored her performance in the BBC’s brilliant dramatisation of the Rochdale grooming scandal; embittered and angry at the world, undervalued by her crime boss father (Eddie Marsan), she snarls through the capital sniffing cocaine and firing off sparks from her fingers at anyone who dares rub her up the wrong way.
The three teenage protagonists (Auli'i Cravalho making up the trio) are fantastic, but it’s the series’ lead adult actresses – Toni Collette as Seattle mayor Margot Cleary-Lopez and Zrinka Cvitešić as the Moldovan leader’s trophy wife – who spearhead much of the driving action. Margot, struggling to balance her political ambitions with the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, becomes the accidental figurehead for the “electric girls” after opposing government interventionist measures (comparing it, seemingly, to regulations on abortion), opening up her world to an ugly crusade of internet trolls and real-world threats. Cvitešić’s Tatiana, although disappointingly stereotyped – are we to believe every woman in post-Soviet Eastern Europe was a potential Olympic gymnast, obsessed with plastic surgery and bling? – has the glimmer in her eye of a woman who holds all the cards.
Away from the core electrical condition being a somewhat jarringly obvious metaphor for the difficulties of puberty – Periods! Orgasms! Whatever next! – The Power is filled with thrills, and will appeal to a wide audience from teenage fans of Stranger Things to nostalgic adults fresh from bingeing Yellowjackets or The Last of Us. Hopefully, there’ll be another season, because these girls have plenty of zap left in them yet.
The first three episodes of The Power will be released on Amazon Prime Video on Friday March 31, then follow weekly
