How an adaptation recycles its inspiration’s most famous moments is make-or-break stuff for the remake. Lean on it too heavily or reuse it beat for beat and you run the risk of reminding people why they liked the original so much, perhaps to the detriment of your own. Underplay it or eliminate it entirely and you may lose something not only memorable from the source material but indispensable to the overall project. (Broadway’s current musical adaptation of The Lost Boys, for example, knew it needed to include a shirtless, shiny sax guy.)
Remixing the material in an unexpected but on-theme way often provides a happy medium, and horror, a genre that’s constantly devouring itself for the nutrition it requires in order to vomit forth new terrors, is perfect for this approach. Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth reworks imagery and character types from the Ridley Scott and James Cameron films but adds a mesmeric, dreamy vibe all its own. Rolin Jones’s Interview with the Vampire/The Vampire Lestat make the racial, sexual, and political subtext of Anne Rice’s source novels text, while translating her florid prose into lurid spectacle.
In the case of Cape Fear, this can be accomplished with something as simple as taking the scene from Martin Scorsese’s movie where Robert De Niro’s Max Cady laughs disruptively in a movie theater and assigning it to the guy’s daughter instead.
Neveah, aka Amber, emerges as a menacing co-antagonist all her own in this episode. It’s true that she’s been turned into the monster she is now by her father, who corrupted her while canny enough to have both of them cover their tracks. It’s not quite right to say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree; it’s more like the tree reached out, grabbed the apple, held it close, and slowly poisoned it.
We find all this out through the dogged, if incredibly ill-advised, amateur sleuthing done by Anna. First she tracks Neveah down to that movie theater to confront her, leading to an outdoor fracas over the taste of her children’s nipples that leaves Neveah momentarily knocked out by a passing car. (She gets better.) The incident goes viral and Anna gets suspended from her non-profit job. One Bowden down, three to go.
Despite the fact that Neveah has been outed not only as Max’s daughter but also as seeing both Bowden siblings, Zack and Natalie’s interest in the girl does not appear to decrease. Natalie resents her parents’ secrets much more than Amber’s, for example.
But it’s really hard to tell what’s going on with Zack, as he seems zoned out and high most of the time, and may even be suffering from some sort of severe mental health episode. He gets in a physical altercation with Natalie, physically intimidates his mother, and appears to have gotten into the syncretic religion Max apparently invented for himself in prison, to which Neveah/Amber is also a devotee. Two Bowdens down, two to go.
At work, meanwhile, Tom is faced with a dilemma. His biggest client wants his associate Lexi removed from the case, because she can sense a vibe and feels Tom is distracted by her. Lexi, who argues the woman’s real interest is in having Tom all to herself, demands to stay on the case — and threatens to go to human resources with their inappropriate relationship should he refuse to fight for her, even if it risks losing the client.
Enter Max. As always, he’s everywhere the Bowdens are, repeatedly “bumping into” Tom at restaurants and bars, always with apologies for sending the wrong signals and explanations for why Tom’s suspicions are misplaced. Perhaps out of a misguided belief in keeping your enemies closer, Tom eventually relents and buys Max a drink, attempting to ingratiate himself with the man who’s attempting to ingratiate himself with him. (Follow all that?)
The effect of Max’s charms are not exclusive to the fairer sex. By the end of their evening, when they’ve moved from Tom’s swanky lawyer joint to a relative dive bar, the two men are laughing like old pals.
But wouldn’t you know who else is at the bar? The two dirtbags who tried to use “Tommy’s” pool earlier in the season at the urging of an unknown friend. Weirdly, that doesn’t appear to have been Max: The couple don’t appear to know him, and they don’t strike me as convincing liars. But who knows.
What is clear is that Max is the devil on Tom’s shoulder. He encourages him to stand up for himself like a man with the unspecified coworker he complains about (Max has seen Tom with Lexi by now, alas for them both). He then picks a fight with one of the dirtbags, initiating combat just out of range of the bar’s security camera, then leaving Tom to mop things up on his own while every moment is recorded.
The next morning Tom finds himself suspended from work too, though not for the reasons you might have expected. It’s not his kiss with Lexi has gotten him in hot water, nor their mutual microdosing. (“You gave that to me!” “You’re my boss! You shouldn’t have taken it!” Very funny stuff.) Nor is it even his Road House–style bar fight from the night before. It’s a crude and threatening voicemail he left Lexi — which he doesn’t remember leaving, which indeed at the moment we have no reason to believe he did at all, and every reason to believe Max somehow planted. Three Bowdens down, one to go.
That same night, Anna makes her own incredibly bad decision. (Both of them are making tons of these, underlining Natalie’s suspicion that they’re hiding something big regarding Max; only people who are scared absolutely shitless would be this stupid this often.) Rejected by her P.I. Ray when she asks for his help looking into Neveah, Anna reaches out to her mother, Faith (Martha Millan), herself.
Faith has long ago gotten over her delusions about Max, who discarded her as a lover the moment she was caught and fired by the corrections department and thus served no further purpose for him. Battered by her daughter, Faith tells Anna that Max changed her once they got in contact. She also tips Anna off to Neveah’s hiding place, though by the time she gets there the girl is long gone. (Zack’s toe is there, however.)
And by the time Anna gets back to Faith’s, the woman is dead. Her skull has been absolutely annihilated by blunt force, using the religious idol Anna found Zack with earlier in the episode. Rather than call it in, Anna flees, though not before she gets the woman’s blood all over everything she has on. Like I said, lots of bad decisions being made here.
Which is not to say Max is immune from trouble himself. Juliette Lewis’s character interrupts him at Tom’s bar one time; Max pulls her off into the walk-in humidor, kisses her, calls her a “sick ddelusional freak who I could never love,” threatens to kill her, kisses her again, spits in her face, and leaves.
What upsets him so badly? “I thought we could hurt each other again,” she says, claiming she reached out to him in dreams, a claim he actually accepts.
So. They’re close enough to talk in dreams. They’ve hurt each other in the past, clearly in a sexualized way, though not a psychologically healthy one. They’re both deeply mentally ill; she claims she’s on an effective pharmaceutical regimen but the proof is in the pudding, and Max is, well, Max. They both show multiple signs of extensive abuse, from Max’s flashbacks of living in a dog cage to her own facial scar. Judging from the videotape she left him, she seems to know exactly how he was abused.
If I were an Anna-style amateur detective, I’d start looking for childhood photos of the two of them together — possibly in the dog cage that their father placed them in as half-siblings. (If i’m right, it’s not even the only incestuous kiss in this episode, as Neveah kisses her own mother in a disturbing and intimidating fashion as well.)
But things wind up looking up for ol’ Maximiliano Cady. Walking past the Bowdens’ house one morning with his adorable slobbery dog, he chats up Natalie, who’s still interested in both “Amber” and (not romantically) Max despite it all. When Tom and Anna notice and tell him to go home, he does exactly that…by walking across the street, opening the door to the house he just bought facing theirs, and smiling before closing the door behind him.
What Max is doing is playing the most long-term, high-stakes game of “not touching you! not touching you! not touching you!” of all time. Over the course of years he built his plans for revenge, turning various people (mostly women and girls) to his cause. (Tabitha, the vapid journalist, seems on the verge of becoming one of his disciples herself.)
There’s no law against bumping into people, or having a daughter, or buying a house. He’s not doing anything, not that they can successfully pin on him anyway. Since every word Max speaks to the Bowdens is friendly, at least on the surface, there’s little grounds for any kind of legal protection. They just have to sit there and take it as he tricks them into being their own undoing. Judging from the number of unforced errors they make this episode, that won’t be too hard. Cape Fear is a journey into brains as overheated and unhealthily vibrant as the colors of the show itself.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.