The Iris Affair

The Geography of the Chase

I tend to brace myself when a glossy, sun-drenched tech thriller starts hopping from one beautiful European location to another. You know the species: impossibly attractive people cracking impossible systems from a café in Florence before tearing off in a speedboat. We've seen this setup so often it no longer feels like storytelling so much as a preset.

Yet *The Iris Affair* got its hooks into me anyway. Neil Cross, after years spent rummaging through the wet, gray gloom of *Luther*, seems to have decided he deserved some sunshine. With Terry McDonough and Sarah O'Gorman directing, he turns this eight-part Sky series into a frantic, highly ridiculous game of hide-and-seek. I could not swear the plot survives close inspection. Maybe it doesn't. The show is fun because it hurls itself so hard at its own nonsense and never blinks.



The setup is both absurdly overbuilt and weirdly clean. Iris Nixon is an Irish math prodigy and obsessive puzzle-solver. She breaks an impossible code, which draws the eye of tech billionaire Cameron Beck, who wants her to wake up his dormant, god-like AI supercomputer. (For reasons the script neither explains nor apologizes for, the machine is called "Charlie Big Potatoes.") Iris realizes the thing might end the world, steals the activation sequence, and disappears along the Italian coast.

What keeps the whole machine running is not really the rogue-AI threat. It is the clash between the two people at the center. Niamh Algar plays Iris less as an eccentric genius than as someone who meets the world with unnervingly cold efficiency. Her body stays tight. When violence erupts, she barely seems to blink. Algar, who was so open and wounded in *The Virtues*, strips all of that softness away here. She pushed to keep her native Mullingar accent, pointing out how rarely Irish characters get to be globe-trotting super-geniuses instead of pub brawlers. It gives Iris a footing. As she darts through Sardinia in bucket hats and colored contacts, that voice is what keeps her tethered to earth.



Then you get Tom Hollander as Cameron Beck. Patrick Freyne in *The Irish Times* nailed Hollander's particular magic when he wrote that he can embody “cuddly evil.” Beck pads around his concrete bunker in Slovenia like a middle manager whose spreadsheet has betrayed him. His menace doesn't come from sadism so much as vanity and techno-utopian delusion. The way he holds a gun is perfect—loose, almost sheepish, as if the weapon itself were an embarrassing breach of etiquette. He makes apocalypse look oddly appealing.

There is a sequence midway through that catches McDonough's directorial rhythm exactly. Iris traps an assassin in a stolen Fiat 500 near a cliff. Instead of cutting to frantic close-ups, the camera hangs back. Iris calmly soaks the car in petrol, sets it alight, and sends it toward the edge. The blast blooms huge and orange against the rocks, and Algar doesn't flinch. She doesn't even glance away. She simply watches the numbers do what the numbers were always going to do. In miniature, that's the show: high heat, no panic.



Whether that emotional frost feels like a bug or a feature depends on what you want from this kind of series. The pacing sags now and then, especially around episode five, when the script starts explaining material the actors have already made perfectly clear. The AI talk can feel bolted on, like a TED Talk interrupting a James Bond chase. *The Guardian*’s Lucy Mangan said the writing is "drily witty while avoiding any hint of the cynicism that would spell death for the endeavour." That sounds right to me. You have to surrender to it a little.

By the time the last countdown kicked in, I had stopped worrying about whether Charlie Big Potatoes would become sentient. What held me was the sight of two lonely, unnervingly intelligent people circling each other across the Mediterranean. They are locked in a pursuit neither one seems fully committed to finishing.