‘Alice & Jack’ Review — Domhnall Gleeson & Andrea Riseborough Deserve Better

This review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.Love can be agonizing, but that doesn’t mean stories about it should themselves be painful to watch. Such is unfortunately the case thus far with Alice & Jack, a series about two thinly sketched people it strains to convince us are star-crossed lovers. Starring Domhnall Gleeson and Andrea Riseborough, two talented actors doing everything they can to give this largely shallow story some life, Victor Levin’s latest project takes us into the titular characters’ messy lives following a seemingly ill-fated first date. Over the course of the first two episodes of the series that recently premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Alice (Riseborough) and Jack (Gleeson) find themselves all over the map emotionally in their relationship with each other. Rather than feel like an authentic depiction of the chaos of love, there is a stiffness to the experience that prevents the story from becoming the more dynamic character study it seems to be going for. There is room for Alice & Jack to grow, as it is meant to span 16 years of time that we have only seen the beginning of, but this is certainly a rocky start.

​ Victor Levin’s Alice & Jack, starring Andrea Riseborough and Domhnall Gleeson, doesn’t set its talented cast up for success. Read on for our review.