Caroline Framke in The New York Times:
Zoe Kazan’s “East of Eden” makes her intentions for Cathy Ames, deftly personified by Florence Pugh, clearer in one scene than John Steinbeck does over the course of almost 600 pages.
Based on Steinbeck’s 1952 novel, the Netflix limited series devotes its second episode, “Cathy,” to the backstory of the book’s notorious femme fatale and possible Devil incarnate. In a flashback, we see her as cherubic child reading “Alice in Wonderland” in a field. A faceless older boy offers her candy and disappears into the nearby woods; Cathy, intrigued, toddles after him. Though the director Garth Davis doesn’t follow her down the rabbit hole, the sight of a tiny girl disappearing into the brush is unmistakably sinister. The incident scars Cathy and trails her throughout the series, which traces the entirety of her extraordinary, damned life. Whenever she remembers it, Pugh’s face clouds over with resigned revulsion before re-calcifying into Cathy’s default expression of grim self-possession.
More here.
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