The Sympathizer premiere: A spy thriller with a lot to say (and just as many dumb jokes)

No messing about: That’s what I like to see. The first five minutes of The Sympathizer bombard you with information, characters, flashbacks, unreliable narration, and Robert Downey, Jr. wearing some of the most unsettling color contacts in TV history. It’s an absolute whirlwind, and we have next to no idea what’s happening. In other words, it starts as it means to go on.

Based on the novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer shoves us straight into the boots of someone we know only as the Captain (Hoa Xuande), a half-Vietnamese, half-European mole for the communist fighters of North Vietnam, embedded in the South Vietnam secret police. But that’s not how we meet him. The Sympathizer, in the first of many non-sequential flourishes, introduces the Captain in a North Vietnamese reeducation camp, his mission seemingly over, forced to write and rewrite his confession despite his insistence everything he did was for the North Vietnam cause. And so he starts writing again, starting shortly before the fall of Saigon. Here, he meets his CIA handler, Claude (Downey, Jr. in one of four roles he’ll assume in this series) and the South Vietnamese General to witness the interrogation of a woman who, curiously, had a list of every member of the South’s secret police in her possession.

Through more flashbacks (and then a couple of flashbacks to those flashbacks), we find out the Captain was her contact and arranged for her to get the list. The Sympathizer wastes no time weaving half-truths, shaky alliances, and one hell of an unreliable narrator to keep us on our toes. At the very beginning, the Captain insists Death Wish was the film playing at the theater the day he met Claude, while also acknowledging he’d said it was Emmanuel in his last confession letter.

The premiere is a zippy little hour that almost feels like the most rounded out “previously on” montage in television history. In a tough moment during the woman’s interrogation and torture, the Captain tries to think back to “the last time I felt beauty and hope” and flashes back a few days to hanging out with his friends, Bon and Man, and Bon’s wife and infant daughter. Man is another North loyalist but Bon, who lost his father to a brutal attack by the North, is happy with his life in Saigon, unaware of his two best friends’ allegiances.

There’s a lot to keep track of initially, but once the basics are sorted through it becomes easier to meet The Sympathizer on its very stylized terms. This is only co-creator Park Chan-wook’s second foray into making television after 2018's underappreciated The Little Drummer Girl. You’re likely to be more familiar with his murderers’ row of masterpiece films like Oldboy, The Handmaiden, and 2022's best movie Decision To Leave. Park’s proclivities are on full display early: the concept of duality and doubles, how perception can cause two people standing next to each other to see entirely different worlds. As he begins his confession (hey, if The Sympathizer can jump around its timeline, I can too) the Captain writes, “I am a man of two faces, forced to see every issue from both sides.” Is such a thing in war cowardice, or survival?

As the premiere draws to a close, the fall of Saigon is imminent. The General and Clause haggle over an escape route, which the General insists is a “temporary retreat.” Another of Park’s signatures is examining interpersonal relationships as performance, and there’s plenty of rehearsed machismo between the General and Claude, who agree on two planes to the U.S. instead of the initially-offered one to fly out the General’s friends, family, and a select few from his police force. The Captain in voiceover acknowledges that everyone in the room knows there will not be two planes.

Later over drinks, while Bon is handily winning a bar fight against five soldiers, Man tells the Captain he also needs to be on the plane. The Captain is distraught, but Man reminds him he’s more useful over there as a bilingual, biracial spy who went to an American university. “Your letters home were like fan letters,” Man says with only a hint of accusation mixed into his sadness. Besides, he says, “home is overrated.” He also reminds the Captain of his promise to get Bon and his family out safely.

And so on the eve of the “end” of the Vietnam war, the General’s convoy makes for the Air Force base. As the bus barrels up the runway toward the aircraft, bombs start raining down on the tarmac, one hitting the bus. Bodies are sent strewn in every direction as the survivors make for the plane on foot. As a helicopter is hit, it crashes to the ground and bursts into apocalyptic, flaming debris, killing Bon’s wife and child. The Captain sits in his cell, remembering looking back and forth from Bon’s catatonic face to the departing plane. Tears fall down the prisoner’s face.

Stray observations

• Park’s ability as a director is beyond reproach, and it’s great to see ’70s-era stylistic choices making its way into how the story itself is told and not just the setting.
• Hot off an Oscar win that wasn’t not about shedding some Marvel typecasting, Robert Downey, Jr. is getting multiple characters to sink his teeth into here. We’ve only met Claude so far, but as a stand-in for the arrogant specter of America that hangs over Vietnam to this day, he’s doing good work and having fun with it.
• That said, there are moments of broad comedy shoehorned into the show that really don’t work. I’m all for a silly time, but the officer threatening to commit suicide in the Captain’s office before just emptying a jar of candy into his hat feels like a “first thought” joke. Claude ends just about on the right side of the fence here, but it’s close.
• An officer begs for an extra seat on the plane for his mother, but the Captain insists there is room for a wife and child only. The officer says he’ll leave his daughter with the nanny. “You can always have another kid.”