Sweetpea Review: Ella Purnell Shines as a Wallflower Who’s Dangerously Tired of Being Ignored

When we first meet Sweetpea’s Rhiannon Lewis (Ella Purnell), she’s rattling off a list of people she’d like to kill, Arya Stark-style. This may be the most relatable introduction to a character on a television series this year, if we’re honest. 

This unexpected relatability is a big reason that Starz’s latest thriller works so well. A female revenge story that turns out to have surprising depths alongside a deceptively sharp bite, Sweetpea is one of the most enjoyable surprises of Fall. 

As the series begins, Rhiannon is essentially invisible in her own life. Her coworkers ignore her. Her boss laughs when she asks for a promotion. She’s an afterthought to her sister. The guy she’s been chasing a situationship with won’t text back beyond an occasional emoji. 

Even the cashier at her local market can barely be bothered to hang up her personal calls long enough to ring up Rhiannon’s purchases. 

Things have been like this since high school, where Rhiannon was bullied by a popular girl gang to the point where she started pulling her hair out. And while her hair has grown back in the years that followed, she and her self-confidence have never really recovered from the trauma of that experience. 

Now, she lives a mundane life, working a thankless front desk job as she tends to her ailing father.. But when he dies unexpectedly, her fragile world is sent into a tailspin.

Her bitchy sister’s insisting they sell the family home—which happens to be where Rhiannon’s currently living—and has hired Julia (Nicôle Lecky), her former high school nemesis to be their realtor.

After a particularly brutal day, is it any wonder that Rhiannon finally snaps? Yes, her first true act of violence is technically in self-defense, but it also seems to unlock something in her, and what comes out is deep-seated, boiling rage. 

The story of a wallflower who comes to life by dispensing death, Sweetpea is bitingly funny, shockingly violent, and a surprisingly deft exploration of loneliness. Because while Rhiannon begins to discover her own agency by taking away that of others, moonlighting as a serial killer isn’t exactly a panacea for her problems. 

There’s a certain amount of wish fulfillment at work throughout the series, as it encourages us all to imagine what it might look like to get back at those we feel have wronged us, whether that means speaking up when someone’s rude to us at a shop or paying back a yearslong grudge. 

But while her extracurricular activities certainly give Rhiannon a much-needed boost in confidence that allows her to finally go after what she wants without apologizing for it, it doesn’t fill the emotional hole she’s been carrying around inside her for so long. 

One of the best things about Sweetpea is how willing this series is to complicate the ways we see Rhiannon as a protagonist. She’s a young woman desperate to be seen, but who’s also afraid to look at herself too closely, and who feels most comfortable viewing herself as a victim, even when committing monstrous acts. 

As a character, she’s also wildly sympathetic—it’s really difficult not to openly root for her at times, despite her worst deeds, and sometimes the show seems to imply you should! 

But the series also deftly leads viewers to question what level of agency Rhiannon has over her own life and choices. There’s no doubt that she experienced something awful at the hands of Julia and her cohort, but does that absolve her from all the bad decisions that followed afterward?

Sure, Rhiannon was bullied and traumatized by a pack of mean girls, but is that really an excuse for her to push away the kind co-worker (Calam Lynch) who genuinely seems interested in getting to know her?

Is it really Julia’s fault that Rhiannon is so distracted by a billboard featuring her photo that she allows a terrible accident to happen? 

Sweetpea deftly blurs the boundaries between victim and perpetrator in frequently uncomfortable ways, and the moral ambiguity of it all is a big part of the transgressive fun. 

Its unique themes of self-esteem and isolation help set it apart from similar revenge thrillers or vigilante killer hunts bad guys dramas like You or Dexter, and its specific female focus is a refreshing change in this particular genre space. 

But the real reason to tune into this show is Purnell’s performance, which is stunning from start to finish. 

Her Rhiannon runs the gamut from mousy to magnificent, her growing confidence often indicated by little more than subtle changes in body language. Her heartbreak is genuine, her fury cathartic, her desperation to be seen—more than that to be understood—palpable. 

Despite its many joys, Sweetpea isn’t perfect, though. It struggles to develop its supporting characters beyond the most basic plot beats, and as the bodies begin to pile up, the narrative must come up with increasingly convenient or wildly convoluted explanations for why Rhiannon is repeatedly able to evade detection or arrest.

Some of them work, but some of them strain credulity to the point of (unintentional) hilarity. 

The introduction of a detective, Marina (Leah Harvey), whose sudden obsession with the possibility of Rhiannon’s guilt is fueled by her own understanding of what it’s like to live a life ignored and underestimated, injects a shot of genuine tension into the back half of the season.

But while Harvey and Purnell’s brief interactions crackle onscreen, we learn precious little about Marina for her own sake. 

How long can Sweetpea keep enough narrative plates in the air without Rhiannon getting caught—particularly given the dramatic events of a finale that sets up increasingly bloody (and bloody-minded) choices to come—is a question this season doesn’t attempt to answer. But it’s enough to hope this show will get another season to try. 

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Sweetpea premieres Thursday, October 10 on Starz.

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