‘56 Days’ Review: Dove Cameron and Avan Jogia Conjure Mild Sparks in Amazon’s Overly Chilly Erotic Thriller

56 Days, Prime Video’s new murder mystery thriller based on Catherine Ryan Howard’s bestselling novel, is the TV version of a forgettable fling.

On first impression it’s exciting, or at least intriguing enough to convince you to come back for a second date, maybe a third. But the longer you stick around, the more you start to suspect there’s not much there there. It’s a pretty face in slick outfits, charming enough to distract you for a little while, but ultimately just parroting the same old lines you’ve heard a million times already.

For a while, however, the sheer grossness of its central mystery is enough to lure in some interest. By the time the police have been called in to investigate an unidentified body in a luxury building, it’s been decomposing so long that it looks less like a human than (as the Boston PD detectives, Dorian Crossmond Missick’s Karl and Karla Souza’s Lee, put it) a soup: chunks of half-melted flesh floating in a bath of chemical ooze.

The sight is grotesque enough to make an impression even in a TV landscape absolutely littered with opening-scene corpses of mysterious origin. (It also serves as a reminder that horror prince James Wan is one of many executive producers on the show; Lisa Zwerling and Karyn Usher are the creators.) The disposal suggests a level of calculated depravity beyond that of your typical desperate robber or underpaid hitman — one that seems particularly startling in contrast to the meet-cute that actually gets thigs going, once the series jumps back (you guessed it) 56 days earlier.

Our leads are Ciara (Dove Cameron) and Oliver (Avan Jogia), two strangers both new to Boston. She is a doe-eyed IT tech living out of a termite-infested studio in an unfashionable neighborhood. He’s a rich dude with a job at a prestigious architecture firm and access to a luxe corporate apartment that will someday become the aforementioned crime scene. He makes the first move, complimenting her NASA tote bag after spotting her in a bougie grocery store. She gives as good as she gets, impressing him by listing all the NASA space shuttles by memory.

Their first date at a chichi cocktail bar goes well until it doesn’t, but the connection is strong enough that a few days later, they agree to go on another. That one goes so nicely that she spends the night at his place and then moves in within a matter of days. (Temporarily, due to some work being done in her building, but still.) Naturally, neither is quite as they seem. Oliver is running from a dark past that may or may not include a suspicious death. Ciara has ulterior motives of her own, which may or may not be connected to said past.

None of those red flags seem to matter as much as they should when they’re together, however. 56 Days is billed as an erotic thriller, and Oliver and Ciara spend much of the first few episodes dutifully screwing in beds and cars and random alleyways. Jogia and Cameron share some decent chemistry, and these scenes are titillating in the way that watching two impossibly beautiful, mostly naked people throw their bodies together almost can’t help but be. But their coupling lacks the something extra — like a playfulness, or a deep emotionality, or even a real sense of danger — to make them truly memorable.

This is a problem for a series that hinges on the idea that carnal passion can make people do crazy things, like follow a suspected murderer into an empty construction site, or allow a near-stranger unfettered access to your home, or — for that matter — commit a murder and then try to obscure the evidence in the foulest matter imaginable. 56 Days suggests halfheartedly that the very wrongness of this courtship is what makes it so hot for them, and for us. But its insistence on playing coy about exactly how wrong it is or why, saving all of Oliver and Ciara’s deepest, darkest secrets until the penultimate flashback episode, is to its own detriment.

The choice makes sense from the perspective of a series trying to drag out the suspense as long as possible, ensuring it never runs out of reveals or red herrings to sprinkle over its eight (roughly 45-minute) episodes. And I can’t say it’s an entirely unsuccessful one. The twists come fast enough that I never found myself bored while waiting for the next morsel of information to drop about Ciara and Oliver’s sordid pasts. (That’s at least more than I can say for the parallel “present day” storyline involving Karl, who spends the entire investigation whining about how much he hates his job, and Lee, who gets saddled with an even less convincing version of Ciara and Oliver’s bad-romance arc.)

But it closes off the more intimate character work that’d get a viewer deeply invested in this whirlwind romance to begin with. Without a full understanding of the motives and risks at play, it’s hard to get caught up in either the cat-and-mouse thrill of watching these shady players circle one another or the notes of real vulnerability that eventually start to creep in. Even when the characters say outright what they’re feeling in a particular moment, it’s difficult to know how much stock to put into the words of people whose defining characteristic, as far as we know, is their very untrustworthiness.

The biggest reveals, when they finally arrive, seem intended to sell us on the idea that human beings are more complex than they might seem at first glance. Instead, they do the opposite, offloading one-dimensional cruelty to certain characters to make others look sympathetic by comparison. Maybe psychological and moral complexity is too much to expect from a series that plays like an airport bestseller — fast and trashy and nothing very deep. But with neither enough heat to sell the romance’s darkness nor enough warmth to sell its unexpected notes of sweetness, a story that begins with a memorably toxic stew leaves behind nothing but a faint sour tinge.