New thriller series features Robert Downey Jr. in four roles – but he’s not the best thing about The Sympathizer

Most people certainly have specific images in their minds about the Vietnam War. Whether they are documentary footage from reports or Hollywood film adaptations such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, all of these images have one thing in common: they are told from the perspective of the USA. Author Viet Thah Nguyen has this skewer with his novel The Sympathizer turned around in 2015 and described the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Viet Cong spy in South Vietnam who escapes into American exile. In short, he was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Oldboy director Park Chan-wook is now adapting the story together with Don McKellar as a series for A24 and HBO – and in The Sympathizer we spin a complex story with great performances and an extraordinary production that would be just as ready for the big screen. Particularly interesting: Marvel icon Robert Downey Jr. takes on several varied roles in the series. But the star of the story is someone else.

Traitor, spy, hero, fugitive: This is The Sympathizer

The Captain (Hoa Xuande) has been feeling this way all his life in two halves cracked. As the illegitimate son of a Frenchman and a Vietnamese woman, he was always viewed as an outsider in his South Vietnamese homeland. The Vietnam War also tears him apart, because here he infiltrates the environment of a general in South Vietnam as a Viet Cong spy – and at the same time makes common cause with the CIA.

As a prisoner in a communist re-education camp, he tells his incredible story in flashbacks, which takes him from South Vietnam into exile in California, where he even takes part in a… Hollywood film set about the war – and ultimately brings him back to Vietnam. On his way he questions his identity more than once and meets different versions of Robert Downey Jr. Because in The Sympathizer nothing is as it seems.

Oldboy ace Park Chan-wook films the unfilmable

For a long time, Viet Thah Nguyen’s novel was considered unfilmable. The story of the nameless protagonist was seen as too complex, jumping around in time as much as between genres. However, with Park Chan-wook, who recently ventured into the series cosmos with The Dragonfly, the series has found a more than capable creator and director for this difficult undertaking. He succeeds masterfully to connect different moods and levels and from this to spin an exciting series hybrid somewhere between thriller, satire, drama and comedy that emulates its protagonist.

So the series begins in the final days of the Vietnam War, shortly before the fall of the southern capital Saigon. Here we get to know the reality of the captain’s life, who lives as a spy in constant fear of being discovered. The interrogation of another spy, which conveniently takes place on a theater stage, reflects his own fate, which is reflected in him seven episodes of The Sympathizer will continue. As the narrator’s voice, the captain reveals his complex story to us, which at times comes across as surreal and unreliable.

Quick cuts suddenly catapult us into completely different time levels, jump months forward and weeks back again. Park Chan-wook demands our undivided attention here, because keeping up with this pace isn’t always easy. The camera follows our protagonist in calculated movements, rushes up to his face, shows us the action from above, below or circling around.

The production underlines the chaos that constantly reigns inside the captain, surrounding him, tearing him apart or watching him from a distance. And these tricks don’t just look damn good – above all in the first three episodeswhich clearly bear Chan-wook’s signature (in subsequent episodes he was replaced in the director’s chair by Fernando Meirelles and Marc Munden) – but also lead us emotionally through the story, which always closely follows the captain’s perspective and the dominant narrative of the Vietnam War challenges.

Robert Downey Jr. is as brilliant as he is crazy – and yet falls behind Hoa Xuande

Hoa Xuande manages to portray this torn figure remarkably and to switch between the fronts as much as his character does himself. He is contrasted with a more grounded environment of his best friends Man (Duy Khoa Nguyen) and Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan) and the South Vietnamese general (Toan Le), respectively different sides and interests represent. With Sofia Mori and Lana, he also stands between two lovers who, unlike him, know what they want from life – and are played no less brilliantly by Sandra Oh and Vy Le.

Robert Downey Jr. is cast in several roles here as brilliant as it is crazy. The Marvel star wears different costumes and hairstyles, and switches accents and manners of speaking between CIA agent, professor, politician and director. Even if some of his roles work better than others here, they are still parts of a larger whole. For the captain, these four men are as one-dimensional as they are interchangeable, in that they assume the same antagonistic force in his life and try to exploit him to the fullest.

The episode on the film set of a Hollywood blockbuster similar to Apocalypse Now is the clear highlight – also from Downey Jr., who plays an “auteur” and director who goes over the top in the name of art. No matter how hard the newly crowned Oscar winner tries, the joke loses its impact after a few episodes and his presence even begins to almost disrupt the flow of the narrative later in the series. Because The Sympathizer is at its best when the series stays close to its main character.

When and where is The Sympathizer showing?

The Sympathizer starts with the first episode on April 15, 2024 on Sky or WOW with a streaming subscription. A new episode is published every week on Mondays. The episodes are initially in the Original version with either English or German subtitles available. The German dubbed version will only start on the streamer at a later date.

The miniseries The Sympathizer consists of seven episodes. The basis for this series check was the entire series.