Dove Cameron should be a bigger star. That much is clear in Prime Video’s new erotic thriller 56 Days, in which she is the captivating heart of a story that isn’t quite up to her talent. But to a certain generation, Cameron has always been a star, with her dual roles in Disney Channel’s Liv And Maddie bleeding into a leading turn in the network’s lucrative Descendants movie-musical franchise as Maleficent’s feisty daughter.
All the while, she was releasing music and voicing roles across multiple projects, including a handful of Marvel-animated juggernauts. She also held her own against high-note heavyweights like Kristen Chenoweth and Ariana Grande in NBC’s Hairspray Live! But now she’s also clearly ready to grow up, and her public persona has matured in recent years with more sexually liberated music (“Boyfriend” and “Too Much” are unappreciated bangers) and ambitious acting roles. A few years ago, she even toyed with her own metamorphosis in Apple TV’s Schmigadoon!, first playing a temptingly innocuous farm girl in blond pigtails before navigating a homage to Sally Bowles in a jet-black bob for the show’s morally murky second season.
In many ways, 56 Days feels like the project Cameron has been laying the groundwork to make, a distillation of everything she has refined in her latest act. Over these eight episodes, which are based on the novel by Catherine Ryan Howard, she plays Ciara Wyse, a recent transplant to Boston who bumps into hotshot architecture exec Oliver Kennedy (Avan Jogia) in a supermarket and tumbles into a toxic relationship that ends in murder. Whose murder? The person decomposing in acid in the bathtub will never tell—at least not until later in the season.
This is hardly an original setup: A bad relationship leads to murder, with buddy-cop detectives (played by Karla Souza and Dorian Missick) left to track down a killer while outrunning their own ghosts. But the series, produced in part by James Wan’s Atomic Monster, tries its best with what it has. Namely, it recognizes the real draw here isn’t yet another instantly problematic relationship or the murder mystery born from it but rather the dual motives of Ciara and Oliver, neither of whom are in this for the reasons they claim. Even though they have no problem communicating physically, as seen in a few steamy albeit abbreviated sex scenes, they have a serious issue from the jump with telling the truth. It makes their rapid cohabitation even more tense, with unspoken secrets haunting the corners of Oliver’s high-rise apartment.
But Cameron is the hook throughout. In episode five, a journalist investigating the story surrounding these two makes an observation about Ciara: “She has the strangest eyes; it’s like she sees through you.” Ciara is an observer letting the world around her reveal itself. She is taking notes—literally in some cases—while also calculating her next move. Most of this is done without a single word spoken; and when she does speak, she manages to say a lot with a little. Really, it’s all in her eyes. Cameron has an instinctive talent for conveying a page’s worth of dialogue and character growth with a single unflinching look. And those eyes go a long way to bridging the shortcomings of the story at hand.
Jogia has a steeper hill to climb. Also a mainstay for a young audience (going back to Nickelodeon’s Victorious), the actor has to play both predator and prey. He is the fixation of Ciara’s attention, but he has his eyes set on something else, with his status giving him authority (or at least a perceived sense of it). His story is much more introspective, requiring a different kind of wordless anguish than Cameron’s calculating character, and Jogia is very good at bringing depth to Oliver’s privileged and insular world. Dancing around any real plot points for Ciara and Oliver is, unfortunately, a hazard of the job when writing about this series, which doesn’t reveal its true intentions until they are already deeply intertwined. But that is also part of the problem. There is just too much excess here.
For one thing, the 56-days framework is largely irrelevant. Ciara and Oliver’s passion, combustibility, and potential are distilled through their own agendas, not that particular timeline. Also, those aforementioned detectives are far too preoccupied with their own issues to really delve deep into the case, and the murder-mystery part of this story never really gets off the ground. As such, for a thriller like this (especially one with a decomposing body), the stakes feel remarkably low.
Cameron and Jogia have chemistry and clearly have fun playing off their characters’ respective demons. But it isn’t enough to buoy the weight put on their shoulders in carrying this overly long season. Their collective impact also wanes the further these two get into their relationship, as they make some decisions that feel emotionally and logically disconnected from what the audience is seeing. 56 Days ultimately exists to further Cameron’s slow but steady rise. Her natural gravitas lifts up a story that’s almost as soggy as that body soaking in the tub.
Hunter Ingram is a contributor to The A.V. Club. 56 Days premieres February 18 on Prime Video.