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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Tourist’ On Netflix, Where Jamie Dornan Plays A Man Without His Memory Trying To Outrun His Past

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• The Tourist

What would you do if you lost your memory? Not just what you had for breakfast, but all sense of who you are and who is in your life? Then you find out that someone really, really wants to see you dead? That’s the idea behind the new Netflix series, which originally ran on HBO Max back in 2022.

THE TOURIST : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes of the arid environment in the Australian Outback. A tiny car drives down an empty road.

The Gist: A man (Jamie Dornan) stops for gas; he’s wearing a generic “AUSTRALIA” tourist t-shirt. He has no idea why the attendant at the station makes him sign out for the bathroom key. We see him come out the back door of the bathroom, next to the Dumpsters.

As he’s driving on the seemingly empty road in his tiny Mazda, a massive tractor trailer bears down on him. When the tractor trailer rams the man’s car, he realizes it’s not just an aggressive driver. After a long chase over some rough terrain, the man thinks he’s gotten away from the truck, when the truck slams into him, causing the tiny car to roll over a few times.

The man wakes up in the local hospital, surprisingly not severely injured. However, he has no idea who he is or what he was doing. He doesn’t even remember his own name. He can recall a song title when he’s in an MRI machine, but that’s about it.

A friendly local cop, Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald), goes to his room to take a statement. She is a bit uncomfortable with the man’s lack of memory, but ends up being reassuring to an extent. The only thing he finds in his possessions is a note to meet someone the next day at a diner in a nearby town. Helen says she’ll look into that.

We follow Helen home and see that, like most of us, she has issues with her weight, not the least of which is exacerbated by her fiancé Ethan (Greg Larsen) and their upcoming wedding.

Another thing we see is someone buried underground. Desperate to get out of whatever box he’s been put in, he tries to call someone on his phone, but no one is answering.

The man goes outside to get air, but gets lost inside the hospital, scaring him senseless. He decides to check himself out of the hospital the next day, against medical advice, because he needs to go to that diner and find out just who wanted to meet him there. Helen understands why he wants to do it, and gives him a bus ticket to get there.

At the diner, he meets a waitress named Luci (Shalom Brune-Franklin), who seems to be fascinated by his amnesia. When she spills lemonade on him, she takes him out to where there are bathrooms. Just then, there’s an explosion, right in the booth where he was sitting. He wonders aloud why in the world someone is trying to kill him.

Pictures from a disposable camera found at the crash site help him retrace his steps, as well as video from the gift shop he visited. It brings him back to the gas station and its bathroom. He doesn’t find out his name though, as he signed the key sign-out sheet as “Crocodile Dundee.” But he finds something else; a stuffed koala that he hid next to the Dumpster. Much to his surprise, it starts ringing.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Take the movie  Memento and cross it with the quirkiness of the first season of the  Fargo series, and you’ve got the vibe of  The Tourist.

Our Take: The Tourist , written by Harry Williams and Jack Williams ( The Missing, Fleabag ) looks like it’s a complex show with a twisty plot, but when you really take a close look, it’s pretty straightforward. Dornan’s character has no idea who he is; all he knows is that someone wants to kill him. With the help of Helen and others, he’ll try to piece things together before those that are after him, including Billy (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), the whistling man who almost squashed him in the tractor trailer, catch up to him.

In the first episode,  The Tourist  evolves from what seems like a thriller to a more personal narrative. It’s why we get involved in Helen’s life when she’s off-duty. In a Weight Watchers-style meeting, she claims she doesn’t like her body, even though everyone is yelling about body acceptance. But it also feels like she’s more there because of her fiancé than anything else. So even though Helen knows her name, who’s in her life and what she does, she also hasn’t found herself. Plus, she seems to be made to feel guilty about just about everything.

Perhaps as she gets more involved in the life of Dornan’s character, the more she will figure out who she is. At least that’s what we hope, because Macdonald is utterly charming as Helen, who is very much in the vein of Allison Tolman’s portrayal of Molly Solverson in the aforementioned  Fargo. She’s good at her job, even if she’s a bit green, but also is a friendly and helpful sort who needs to help herself most of all.

There is definitely a bit of a sense of humor running the first episode, but the Williamses aren’t trying to make the show quippy. The humor is there when people seem to be fascinated with Dornan’s character’s amnesia, though he assures them it’s no picnic. The humor creeps in along the edges of the show, but it does just enough to ease what is a pretty serious and grim performance by Dornan.

There is one twist near the end of the episode that we won’t spoil here, but it does make us wonder if, as things get more complicated for Dornan’s character (notice we haven’t named him yet, because the character has none as yet), the plot will become more convoluted. We hope not, as it seems the straightforward manner in which this story is being told suits  The Tourist just fine.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: When the stuffed koala starts ringing, the man digs out a burner phone and answers it. When the man who’s buried starts yelling in relief that he answered, the man says, “Uh, who’s this?”

Sleeper Star: Shalom Brune-Franklin does some compelling work as Luci, and we know that she’s much more involved in this story than most of the first episode lets on.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing we could find.

Our Call:  STREAM IT.  The Tourist  hooked us in with its story, plus the performances by Dornan, Macdonald and Brune-Franklin. Let’s hope the story continues to be interesting as the season goes on.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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'The Tourist' doesn't know who he is — just that someone wants him dead

John Powers

In The Tourist, "The Man" (Jamie Dornan) wakes up in a small town hospital in the Australian outback with no idea who he is or how he got there. HBO hide caption

In The Tourist, "The Man" (Jamie Dornan) wakes up in a small town hospital in the Australian outback with no idea who he is or how he got there.

Ever since the birth of mass communications, our culture has been haunted by the idea of amnesia. In high-class books by the likes of George Orwell or Milan Kundera , forgetting becomes a political metaphor for the erasure of truth. Things are less ambitious in pop entertainments like Memento or the Jason Bourne series . There, memory-loss is less a metaphor than a motor — a gimmick to drive the story forward.

This motor purrs like a Ferrari in The Tourist , a hit BBC series playing on HBO Max. Written by the Williams brothers, Harry and Jack — best known here for The Missing and Baptiste — this funny, suspenseful six-part thriller doesn't merely keep us guessing. It keeps its amnesiac hero guessing, too. He knows even less about his own story than we do.

A bearded, muscled-up Jamie Dornan stars as a T-shirt clad Irishman who gets in a car accident and winds up in a small town hospital in the Australian outback. Known simply as "The Man," he doesn't know who he is or how he got there. But soon after he leaves the hospital, he knows one thing for sure: Somebody wants to kill him.

As he seeks to find out who's after him and why, he's helped by two very different women. Luci (Shalom Brune-Franklin) is a waitress who we aren't quite sure what to make of. In contrast, it's easy to trust probationary constable Helen Chambers, played by Danielle Macdonald. Helen's a newbie cop who struggles with her weight and with a fiancé who speaks of her appearance with such passive-aggressive meanness that I kept hoping he'd become one of the show's murder victims.

While The Man's search for his identity is grippingly plotted, the show lets the action breathe. It takes time to enjoy his encounters with a wide range of oddball types, be it a goofy chess-playing pilot, a Greek mobster, the affably nutty woman who offers him lodging, or the enormous, cowboy-hatted hitman who has the self-satisfied theatricality of an escapee from a Tarantino movie. That said, The Man knows he must keep moving to stay alive.

For all The Tourist 's inventiveness — Episode 5 is a trip — it reminds us that even good pop culture is often derivative. The show's opening car crash sequence mimics the Steven Spielberg movie Duel . More importantly, the Williams brothers are pretty clearly doing a Down Under riff on Fargo . Their series offers the same blend of violence and barbed humor, the same mythologizing of bleak, underpopulated places, and the same cavalcade of viciousness and folly that brings out the heroism in an ordinary person.

The show's moral center is Helen, who, in Macdonald's sensational performance, has our sympathy from the get-go. Her work is so scene-stealingly good that I would call this a career-making performance if I hadn't already said this about Macdonald's electric work as an aspiring New Jersey rapper in the indie film Patti Cake$ .

Helen's transparent goodness makes her the perfect counterpoint to The Man, a handsome hunk who's a mystery, even to himself. It's a great role for Dornan, who, earlier in his career, had a slightly synthetic prettiness that made him ideal for creepy characters like the S&M billionaire in Fifty Shades of Grey . Here, he's a bit older, thicker, and rougher. And just as Brad Pitt often seems liberated when his good looks are masked a bit, Dornan gives his best performance as a man who isn't sure whether or not he's the hero of his own life.

Over the course of the six episodes, The Man struggles to learn whether, back before his accident, he was a good guy or a bad guy. And if he had been a villain, does he have to stay one, even after he starts remembering his past? I won't reveal what he discovers, though I feel obligated to say that you won't get a definitive answer this season. You'll have to watch Season 2 of The Tourist , not yet made, which I bet you will be more than happy to do.

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Jamie dornan in hbo max’s ‘the tourist’: tv review.

The actor plays an amnesiac in a deadly race to figure out his identity in this six-hour slice of Australian pulp fiction.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

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Content bloat on cable and streaming is such an apparently incurable epidemic that even shows that play as lean and mean genre exercises are stuck oozing outside of their deserved boundaries — as if once there’s no marketplace for an idea to be conveyed at 90 minutes, might as well just go forever.

Something like Netflix’s True Story , which would have been an arthouse hit as a brisk John Dahl-directed theatrical thriller, instead became an instantly forgotten Netflix series, because that’s how it could get produced. Significantly better on every level, but still in need of a robust trim, is HBO Max ‘s The Tourist . Ideally, this would have been an Outback-set B-movie probably helmed by somebody like Phillip Noyce. Instead, it arrives on streaming as a six-hour drama replete with illogical misdirects, a second half that’s far less engaging than the first and a disappointing assortment of false conclusions.

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Airdate: Thursday, March 3 (HBO Max)

Cast: Jamie Dornan, Danielle Macdonald, Shalom Brune-Franklin, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson

Creators: Harry and Jack Williams

A story like this should be told without an ounce of fat. Yet even with its occasional excesses, The Tourist is a mostly taut, pretension-lite mystery with a vivid setting, a few surprises and a great trio of lead performances from Jamie Dornan , Danielle Macdonald and Shalom Brune-Franklin.

Created by Harry and Jack Williams and directed half by Chris Sweeney and half by Daniel Nettheim, The Tourist begins with what will prove to be its best set-piece, which isn’t always a great idea but in this case serves to get viewers well and truly hooked.

In a remote corner of rural Australia, a man (Dornan) with an Irish accent and no name stops for gas and a bathroom before resuming his drive. Before you can say “Hey, that’s the plot of Duel !” a truck emerges on the horizon, approaches the man’s car and tries to run it off the road. An intense pursuit ensues, all within the first 10 minutes, climaxing in the man waking up in a hospital with complete amnesia. Shot with acrid, epic scope by Ben Wheeler and edited without relief by Emma Oxley, it’s a sequence that is unique despite its familiar elements — one that’s so good that you probably won’t be offended by how little sense it makes once the show puts all of its cards on the table.

The Man doesn’t remember his name, his profession or why he was driving alone in a beat-up car on a stretch of road connecting nowhere to nowhere else, but his presence draws immediate attention. Offering benign curiosity is Probationary Constable Helen Chambers (Macdonald), trying to make a transition to legitimate policing after tiring of menial duties as a traffic cop. Offering more menacing curiosity is Billy Nixon (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), a hulking figure with a bushy beard, a rumbling voice, a questionable American accent and a blood-red cowboy hat. And it’s hard to read the intentions of diner waitress Luci (Brune-Franklin), who may be attracted to The Man because of his resemblance to Jamie Dornan, or else she has ulterior motives.

For the first few episodes, The Tourist is wonderfully spare. A couple of secondary characters pass in and out, but the story is mostly The Man, Helen, Luci and Billy, any one of whom could be a threat to the others. As the Williams brothers open the story up, it invariably becomes less interesting and more reliant on heaping doses of exposition. We meet characters including an odd detective played by Damon Herriman and some unsavory Greek gangsters. All of the characters are in the middle of their own identity crises, and while The Man is the only one who literally doesn’t know who he is, each person here is pondering existential questions about whether people can change; whether that change is a matter of personal choice; and whether it’s as simple as forging a passport or moving to a new country or making up different origin stories involving your mother or father.

From the too-clever-by-half backwards storytelling of Rellik to the structural mendacity of Liar , the Williams brothers are good at high-concept thrillers driven by tricky plot mechanics, and this fits that category more than other Two Brothers Pictures creations like the tormented The Missing . The more gaps in The Man’s story they expose, the more interesting The Tourist is; the more those gaps get filled in, the less interesting the resulting shape of the puzzle feels.

None of the answers is exactly infuriating and some of them play very well in the moment — the fifth episode is a straight-up backstory dump, but the creators find a way to make it amusing — but the more distance you get from the full story, the more you may find that very little holds together. It’s possible to concentrate on the occasional shootouts, a flimsy-but-taut storyline lifted from the Ryan Reynolds movie Buried and one stunning outback vista after another, and still be limitedly bothered by lapses in common sense.

It helps that this is probably the funniest of the Williams brothers thrillers, a reminder that as producers their credits also include the very fine Back to Life and the spectacular Fleabag . If you think the plot strains credulity, so do many of the characters, and there are crackling exchanges of dialogue, silly pieces of flirtation and enough quirky and outsized figures to make it clear that if Duel was the series’ table-setting inspiration, most of what follows is basically Fargo with a greater risk of kangaroos.

Dornan is probably too hunky to be inherently ideal as the Hitchcockian Everyman, but The Man is a savvy encapsulation of Dornan’s varied skills, especially those he’s been showcasing in his projects from the past year-ish. He has compelling chemistry with both Macdonald and Brune-Franklin, he’s generally convincing as a sturdy action lead and he has an underlying menace that lets you wonder if the man that The Man used to be might not be so virtuous. Best of all — and this will not shock the Barb and Star hive — Dornan is an adroit comic performer, whether it’s expressing Irish-accented confusion about a fluffy stuffed koala or any of the bickering that characterizes The Man’s relationships with Helen and Luci. He weathers all of the reveals about his character, up to the finale’s conclusive twists. It’s just a darned good performance in a show that hinges on its lead.

Macdonald is, at some points, nearly a co-lead and the Patti Cake$ star brings nervous humor and the real emotional hook to the story, maintaining the character’s integrity in the face of a sometimes sweet, mostly unappealing engagement to Greg Larsen’s brutally passive-aggressive Ethan. I wish somebody had written more actual traits for Brune-Franklin’s Luci, but the simmering interactions with Dornan keep the show going through its slower parts. Herriman’s guessing-game strangeness and Ólafsson’s garrulous intimidation are responsible for the show’s most Coen Brothers-y elements.

At six hours, The Tourist ‘s focus wavers, but its momentum remains solid; in a spring of self-important ripped-from-headlines TV storytelling, I appreciated its pulpy drive. And that “Shouldn’t this be a couple of hours shorter?” sensation? Well, I guess that’s just a permanent condition.

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'The Tourist' Season 2 Review: Jamie Dornan’s Netflix Thriller Remains a Killer

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The Big Picture

• The Tourist Season 2 continues its captivating storytelling in Ireland, filled with dark twists and unpredictable writing.
• Jamie Dornan shines as the leading man, showcasing versatile acting and dynamic emotions alongside co-star Danielle Macdonald.
• The series maintains its unique tone, blending genres like horror and comedy with influences from filmmakers like the Coen Brothers and David Lynch, as well as films like Saw and Psycho .

When The Tourist first premiered on Max in 2022, its smartly written ending felt like the perfect conclusion to the puzzling, dark comedy. The neo-Western reminiscent of Coen Brothers classics like Fargo and Blood Simple about one man’s amnesia-filled romp across the Australian outback was a captivating odyssey blending action, mystery, and dark humor. But despite showrunners Harry and Jack Williams and series star Jamie Dornan , insisting it was never meant to be more than one season, an abundance of critical acclaim and an astounding audience of 11.4 million viewers following its BBC run proved there was more story to tell. With The Tourist making its anticipated U.S. debut on Netflix this month, Season 2 tonally hits all the right notes for a uniquely twisted, action-thriller that is genuinely fun and engrossing .

Originally produced for the BBC and premiering Season 2 on its new streaming home at Netflix on February 29, The Tourist continues to show its strengths by not wasting any time. Trading the desert-hued ambiance of the Australian outback for lush, sprawling vistas of Ireland where Dornan’s character Elliot Stanley is from, things take a wild turn when he returns home for answers. Though the premise feels similar to the first season, as Elliot still can’t remember who he is, The Tourist remains self-assured while crafting a real sense of distinction through unpredictable writing and authentic performances that will keep you glued to your seat.

What Is 'The Tourist' Season 2 About?

After a heartbroken Elliot (Jamie Dornan) swallows a bottle of pills and former Constable Helen Chambers ( Danielle Macdonald ) decides to give him another chance in the Season 1 finale, we learn the two nomads are eagerly traveling the globe together. The series quickly establishes their relationship, revealing the pair are very much in love . While they are in the middle of their Southeast Asian trip, Helen tells Elliot she received a letter from someone named “Tommy,” who claims to know him. When they try and meet up with the mysterious stranger in Ireland, Elliot is shortly kidnapped by the Donal family in what is also one of the funniest scenes from the dark comedy , which finds Dornan running up a hill in a heartstopping chase as his assailants play The Pretenders’ “Don’t Get Me Wrong.”

Though it appears he’s escaped after tumbling down a long emerald hill, Elliot's pursuers find him and things get a little ugly — think Saw . Meanwhile, Helen calls the police and reports to Detective Ruairi Slater ( Conor MacNeill ) that her boyfriend is missing. While at the station, she meets Niamh Cassidy ( Olwen Fouéré ), who was sent a photograph of her kidnapped son Elliot – except, his name is “Eugene” and the last time she saw him was when he was 27.

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As Elliott and Helen try to find the truth and get stuck in the most outlandish situations while apart, their energizing love story raises the stakes for how The Tourist has evolved from Season 1 . Through smart and precise pacing that locks down interest through thoughtful writing, a lot happens across the show’s six episodes. As Elliot navigates all he learns about his past and discovers a bloody rivalry between two warring families, the Irish countryside is the perfect setting for his psyche as we go through literal peaks and valleys thanks to dark twists and turns. Whereas a barren and bleak outback served as a strong character in Season 1, the second season's new landscape is a clever addition to this chapter of Elliot’s life.

Jamie Dornan Is the Beating Heart of 'The Tourist' Season 2

One of the show’s greatest appeals is its cast. Showcasing a magnetic versatility, Dornan proves he is a tremendously watchable leading man . While audiences might be quick to think of him as Christian Grey, the actor has distinguished himself as a real force with a refreshing energy. In taking on the complex role of a man continually finding new information about himself, Dornan makes profound use of his diverse acting strengths as a character who has met some painful, fragmented truths. As Elliot makes sense of who he is, the actor’s approach blends complex emotions eloquently through striking expressions and delivery. These nuances, filled with wide-eyed panic and unease, find Dornan seamlessly embodying a multitude of emotions while remaining dry, humorous, and humbly charismatic.

Complimenting Dornan in the series is Danielle Macdonald, who is every bit as magnetic as her co-star . If Dornan is The Tourist 's heart, Macdonald is its compass. Her infectiously likable personality is a delight on-screen as she makes the darker tones of the series brighter with her genuine warmth . With all her character’s quirks and a discerning eye for the particulars, Macdonald’s portrayal gives off some big Marge Gundersen à la Fargo vitality. Her chemistry with Dornan is effervescent, giving the series the boost it needs amid shadowy elements .

The supporting cast rounds out The Tourist most impressively. While Season 2 sees the return of Helen’s (hilariously) awful ex-boyfriend Ethan ( Greg Larsen ) as he tries to make amends, his appearance makes for some laughable moments between him and Dornan’s Elliot. Olwen Fouréré joins the series in its second season as Elliot’s mother/badass crime lord matriarch. While her performance is focused and deep, she adds a nice weightiness to the series’ more shadowed tones. Also new to the show is the Garda detective played by Conor MacNeill ( best known for The Fall , which also stars Dornan), who portrays a gripping character rooted in some deeply grim events. While his character takes a serious turn and creates one of the show’s more WTF moments , it’s an absorbing juncture straight out of the shadiness of a Coen Brothers film and sets the tone for what more we can expect from these bizarre characters surrounding Elliot.

'The Tourist' Season 2 Excels With Its Smartly Applied Influences

With strong writing and ambitious plot turns that will give you serious whiplash, The Tourist is edgy, brutal, and laugh-out-loud funny. Taking audiences on an unpredictable journey through the glorious backroads of Ireland, there is a lot to love about this show and the various genres it pulls up most naturally . Playing with horror through strong nods to the aforementioned Saw and even Psycho , The Tourist is clever and gripping in every way imaginable without ever feeling overdone.

Thanks to atmospheric and unsettling sequences, The Tourist is every bit a neo-Western that sprinkles in the manic traits of the Coen Brothers, David Lynch , and Quentin Tarantino films. It might sample some of these filmmakers’ best works, but it’s a series all its own due in part to its enigmatic plots and characters. Accentuating themes of antiheroes and identity all wrapped into six compelling hours, showrunners Harry and Jack Williams have managed to create a world that evokes a deeply spirited, edgy, and pointed rhythm . Woven through a distinct narrative approach characterized by sharp dialogues and bold visuals, the series’ kinetic energy can get quite dark but is challenged by some very uncommon storytelling threads. The Tourist Season 2 can feel quirky and outlandish thanks to its consistent chaos, but it works; there is a distinguishable stylishness to the Williams siblings’ production that encompasses some deeply nail-biting suspense and snappy humor .

The Tourist

The Tourist remains pitch-perfect and hits all the right notes for a uniquely twisted and fun action-thriller.

• The Tourist remains self-assured while crafting a real sense of distinction through unpredictable writing and authentic performances.
• Dornan makes profound use of his diverse acting credits as a character that has met with some painful, fragmented truths.

The Tourist is available to watch on Netflix in the U.S.

Watch on Netflix

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‘The Tourist’ Thrills, but Doesn’t Take Itself Too Seriously

Even though the six-episode series, airing on HBO Max, is gripping and full of surprises, its creators made sure to include some offbeat humor.

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By Desiree Ibekwe

LONDON — After his car is rammed off the road by a mystery driver in a truck, a Northern Irishman wakes up in a hospital in the Australian outback with no memory of who he is. “I keep telling myself to just try and remember,” he tells the police officer that comes to take his statement, “but it’s like trying to make yourself fly.”

That is the starting gun for “The Tourist,” a six-part limited series that premieres Thursday on HBO Max. After the man, played by Jamie Dornan (“ Belfast ”), leaves the hospital, it becomes clear he was involved in some murky business in his former life, and someone definitely wants him dead.

The opening premise would suggest a typical thriller. Memory loss is a familiar plot device for the genre (see: “Memento,” “The Bourne Identity” et al). “The Tourist,” which first aired on the BBC in Britain this year, is similar in form to the broadcaster’s other tense, tight shows, such as “ The Night Manager ” and “ Bodyguard .”

Unlike those offerings, “The Tourist” adds more offbeat humor and touches of the surreal to a gripping central plot that still provides car chases, shootouts and international criminal outfits.

When he first read the script, Dornan found it surprising, he said in a recent interview. “Any time I thought it was one thing, or I had a handle on where it was heading, it was altered,” he said. “It was sometimes really subtle, and sometimes it was a big whack over the head.”

As the episodes unfurl, rooting for the confused, likable character becomes a little more complicated. In a recent interview, Dornan said that when he first read the script he wondered if the audience would still be on the man’s side, “searching for the answers when they find out what some of the answers are.”

Dornan’s character is joined in his hunt for answers by the police officer from the hospital, Helen Chambers ( Danielle Macdonald ), who is on her first assignment off traffic duty. She feels strangely compelled to help the man, who also finds assistance from Luci Miller (Shalom Brune-Franklin), a waitress he meets at a cafe.

The show’s setting in small-town Australia helps provide comic relief through characters like a hapless but well-meaning rookie police officer and the elderly owners of a bed-and-breakfast. Amid the chaos and danger, there are scenes that tip into the wholesome and heartwarming.

Helen, the police officer, is also an unlikely thriller protagonist: kind, honest and unassuming. Macdonald sees her character as the show’s “Everywoman,” she said in a recent interview. When we first meet Helen, it is clear that she is unhappy and underestimated, by herself and her fiancé.

Macdonald said that she had spent some time figuring out the character’s role in the plot. “The rest of the show is so dark and Helen was so light,” she said. “It ended up balancing really nicely.”

The show’s writers and creators, the brothers Jack and Harry Williams, have become known for conventional thrillers such as the Golden Globe-nominated show “ The Missing .” “The Tourist” came from a desire to do something different. “It’s the kind of show we’d watch, it’s the kind of show we really enjoy doing,” Jack said.

The brothers also have experience with dark-hearted television comedies, having been executive producers on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “ Fleabag ” and on Daisy Haggard’s “ Back to Life .” Their latest show, then, was about “bridging that gap, because having made comedies and made drama, it just felt like a natural place for us to operate,” Harry Williams said.

They brought on Chris Sweeney, who also worked on “Back to Life,” to direct half of the series. Despite wanting to work on nondirectorial projects at the time, Sweeney said that he had been won over. “I don’t like straight thrillers, it’s not my thing, but I like things that use a device to talk about what is human existence in a playful way,” he said in a video interview.

“The Tourist” questions not only how the past defines us, but also — through the character trajectories of both the central character and of Helen — the other things we lean on to build our identities. Sweeney said that he felt the script had the “personality” of films he loves within the thriller genre, like the work of the Coen brothers. He described elements of the show as a “love letter” to those films, with scenes that evoke “ No Country for Old Men ” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight.”

Dornan was initially a little concerned about the show’s genre medley. While shooting in Australia, “the three of us, Shalom, Danielle and I, we were all in equal parts terrified at different moments because of the comedy and the drama, and how to find the comfortable line there,” he said. “I was a bit like, are people going to know what this is, or where to hang their hat on it?”

In Britain, at least, the concerns seem to have been unfounded. When “The Tourist” arrived on the BBC’s streaming service on New Year’s Day, it was met with glowing reviews and quickly became the platform’s third-most successful drama opening to date.

Jack Williams said he thought that the show had resonated with audiences, in part, because of its escapist quality, adding that it “isn’t trying to reflect back some of the angst and misery that everyone’s been experiencing for a few years.”

As well as diving into a mystery, viewers of “The Tourist” are transported to a stark, almost otherworldly landscape. The show was filmed across several different locations in the sprawling expanse of southern Australia, where you can “point the camera anywhere and it just looks incredible,” Harry Williams noted. “That said, we had to travel quite a lot of hours within the outback in order to get that desired effect,” he added.

The travel contributed to the shoot’s lasting five months, a period of filming that was also stretched by the ambition of the show: The opening car chase sequence was filmed over two weeks. “It was the hardest job I’ve ever done,” Dornan said. “It’s the longest job I’ve ever done.”

With the show’s success in Britain has come discussion about the possibility of a second season. The show was conceived as a self-contained mini-series, similar to the BBC’s other six-part shows. That “less is more” approach contrasts with the sprawling nature of much of American network television; Showtime’s thriller “Homeland,” for example, ran for eight seasons and 96 episodes.

Tommy Bulfin, a BBC drama commissioning editor, said in an email that, while the broadcaster has a “tradition of doing six episode runs,” ultimately the practice of doing shorter productions was down to the subject matter. “I think the key to the success of these shows is that they’re all excellent examples of brilliantly crafted stories,” he said.

The Williams brothers echoed that sentiment. In thinking about the length of “The Tourist,” the story took precedence. “You have to kind of follow that and the natural course that it would take and not try and squeeze out more,” Harry said. The pair wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a second season, but added that they were cautious about doing so.

“There is no perfect length, just like there’s no perfect length for a book,” Harry Williams said. “But there is an appropriate length for a story.”

Desiree Ibekwe is a news assistant on the Audio team. Before joining The Times in 2020, she was a reporter at Broadcast Magazine and completed a fellowship at The Economist.  More about Desiree Ibekwe

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Jamie Dornan’s turn in The Tourist will make you forget about Christian Grey

With the belfast star in the driver’s seat, hbo max’s six-part series piles on the twists, turns, and the occasional acid trip.

It takes a big person to admit that they were wrong, which makes it so hard for an actor to shift the established opinion of them within the culture and critical establishment. It seems that HBO’s The Tourist may just do something truly Herculean, and make all the Jamie Dornan naysayers admit he’s actually a pretty good actor.

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Not that people were without reason to doubt Dornan’s talents. When he first came to international attention, it was as Christian Grey, a kinky but bland billionaire in the 50 Shades trilog y. Those films were never considered high art, but have aged like warm milk, along with Dornan’s comments that he researched his role as the serial killer in The Fall by stalking unsuspecting women. But credit where it’s due—Dornan now joins the ranks of Robert Pattin son, Kristen Stewart, and former co-star Dakota Johnson as a person who made interesting choices after their franchise ended and looks to become one of our credible millennial actors. The actor delighted audiences in recent hits like Barb And Star Go To Vista Del Mar and Belfast .

This six-episode HBO Max series starts with one of the great tropes of melodramas—total amnesia befalls a handsome stranger after a terrible car crash, leaving him unable to remember so much as his own name. A kindly rookie police officer named Helen (Danielle Macdonald) takes pity on him and hopes to help him recover some, if not all, of his memories. Armed with nothing more than a note with a restaurant name and a time, the man sets out on his quest to figure out who he is and what he is doing in the remote Australian outback. To say much more would spoil much of the fun, and boy, is The Tourist fun. Some of the early twists follow may well-worn paths, but there’s no way to predict the roller-coaster ride ahead.

Macdonald gets to use her native Australian accent to play a character with parallels to Fargo ’s beloved Marge Gunderson, a folksy moral compass whose instincts prove invaluable. But where Marge was a well-respected detective in a loving marriage, Helen can only dream of the same. She is undermined both professionally and personally. One of the most enjoyable supporting characters is her spectacularly awful fiancé Ethan (Greg Larsen), who shames her for eating burgers, complains about her desire for high thread-count sheets, and labels her ambition as “delusions of grandeur” (which he repeatedly mispronounces). Even in a world of abundant brutality, it’s not hard to want a little more of it pointed in Ethan’s direction. It’s a credit to Larsen’s performance that he creates a man so intolerable, it’s worth continuing watching just for Helen’s inevitable realization that she’s far too good for him.

Though a good breakup is reason enough to stay engaged, The Tourist also does great cinematic work in its action sequences. We open with the amnesia-causing incident, where Dornan, driving alone in a dusty compact car through the Outback, singing along to Kim Carne s’ “Bette Davis Eyes,” is pursued by a giant truck. At first, it seems like he’s just come across an asshole driver, but the moment it clicks that this is a many-wheeled high-speed weapon is utterly terrifying. The chase feels more horror film than TV action sequence, a tone that runs throughout the many moments of violence The Tourist puts on screen. Every crunch of bone, severed artery, and choke of breath feels visceral and impressively horrific. Much like Fargo , part of the fun of The Tourist is breaking up humorous moments among sweet local eccentrics with breathtaking cruelty. And those tonal shifts are expertly employed by the supporting cast, particularly Shalom Brune-Franklin, Damon Herriman, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, and Alex Dimitriades, who pack all the intrigue of film noir alongside some great humor and convincing derangement.

Twists aside, The Tourist lags in the middle act, but is buoyed by a distinctly adult tone—there’s a gameness to it that makes the scary, horny, and darkly comic elements work well in tandem. Each twist (and they’re deployed every 15 minutes or so) beyond the second episode lands with full weight, particularly in the final episode where Dornan’s acting chops reach their apex.

It’s hard to imagine that The Tourist will have a seismic impact—the era of excellent television is a thankfully crowded one, and little here breaks new ground. But it’s an absolute hoot to travel down the series’ dusty Australian roads, taking in the trippy, almost Lynchian tangents through fractured minds and broken memories. Anti-hero narratives are familiar for a reason, and The Tourist keeps them as compelling as ever; even when it treads familiar territory, it’s never a bore. The paradigm of TV thrillers may not be shifted, but many people’s perceptions o f Jamie Dornan will never be the same.

• Entertainment
• Why <i>The Tourist</i> Should Be Your Next Netflix Binge–And What to Know Before Watching

Why The Tourist Should Be Your Next Netflix Binge–And What to Know Before Watching

T ake a break from endlessly scrolling through Netflix searching for something new to watch and just press play on The Tourist, the BBC series which stars Jamie Dornan as a mysterious Irishman who wakes up in an Australian hospital with amnesia.

The wry thriller isn’t necessarily new—it premiered on the BBC in 2022 and quickly became one of the U.K.’s most-watched dramas of that year—but it is a recent addition to Netflix, which acquired the exclusive rights to the series last year and started streaming it in February. (Season 1 of The Tourist was previously available to stream in the U.S. on Max.) 

At just six episodes, The Tourist is a low-risk, high-reward viewing experience full of twists and turns that are sure to keep you on your toes. Think Memento if directed by the Coen Brothers . Even better, if you like what you see, you can launch right into season 2, which is now streaming.

Here is what you need to know about your next great Netflix binge . 

What is The Tourist about?

The Tourist begins with an Irish guy (played by Dornan) making a pit stop at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, Australia. Nothing seems too out of the ordinary; he fills up his car, questions the gas station attendant’s bathroom key policy, visits the absolutely filthy restroom, and is on his way. But things get weird once he gets back on the road. He finds himself being harassed by a tractor trailer that seems hellbent on mowing him down. Just when it appears that he’s in the clear, he’s T-boned by the truck and left for dead on the side of the dirt road. 

When he wakes up, he’s in the hospital and has no memory of the accident or who he is. He doesn’t have a wallet or ID or phone on him to help jog his memory. This nameless man is now a tourist in his own life, struggling to understand who he was and why someone wanted him dead so badly. With help from a few kind, but not necessarily trustworthy strangers including Probationary Constable Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald), local waitress Luci (Shalom Brune-Franklin), and Detective Inspector Lachlan Rogers (Damon Herriman), he embarks on a journey of self-discovery that leaves him with more questions than answers about his dark past. 

Why it’s worth your time

Let’s start with Jamie Dornan. He played the leading man in the Fifty Shades trilogy and the Academy Award-nominated 2021 drama Belfast , but The Tourist feels like the first time he’s been able to truly show his range as an actor. It’s hard to resist that Irish brogue, but it’s even harder to resist his “ get you a man that can do both ” charm. Fans of the superbly silly Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar already know how funny he can be—not to mention, what a great singer he is. But The Tourist lets him show off his dry, dark wit, while also letting him show off his romantic side. By the end of the series, you’ll be left wondering why he hasn’t yet been cast in a good rom-com. (Sorry, not sorry Wild Mountain Thyme .) In the show’s most gripping action sequences, he manages to channel another amnesiac with killer instincts, Jason Bourne. But thanks to his hangdog expression, Dornan is also able to pull off the existential dread his character feels after realizing he’s not the person he hoped he would be.

Obviously, it’s hard to take your eyes off Dornan, but the scenery in The Tourist isn’t too bad to look at either. The show, set in the Australian outback—like way, way out back—was filmed on location in South Australia around Adelaide, a city known for its coastline. (Adelaide's North Haven Beach serves as the show’s stand-in for Bali’s Kuta Beach.) It was also shot in the Flinders Ranges , the largest mountain ranges in South Australia, and in Peterborough, a small town in an area near Adelaide known as wheat country, which stood in for the sandy outback scenes. (Season 2 takes place in Ireland, so prepare yourself for greenery as far as the eye can see.) Despite all the drama onscreen, The Tourist makes Australia look like a nice place to visit.

What to remember before watching The Tourist season 2

Whether you’ve already finished the first season and need a bit of a refresher or you’re planning to skip straight to Season 2, this is what you need to know before watching the second season. 

Warning: major spoilers for The Tourist Season 1 ahead.

The Irish guy with amnesia is actually Elliot Stanley, and he’s done some really bad things in his life. 

While in the hospital, Elliot finds a note in his pants pocket with an address for a diner in a tiny town called Burnt Ridge. It’s there he meets Luci (Brune-Franklin), a waitress who is actually his ex-girlfriend. She only chooses to tell him his name and their relationship to one another after they discover a man’s dead body stashed in an oil drum that had been buried. The man was Marko (Damien Strouthos), who, like Elliot, worked for Kostas (Alex Dimitriades), an international drug lord and Luci’s fiancé.

Luci isn’t exactly who she claims to be. She’s a scammer who stole a rather sentimental bag of money from Kostas in order to run off with Elliot. Now the Greek gangster is back to collect. But Kostas isn’t all that interested in the cash; a million dollars is chump change to a guy like him. This is about ego. Kostas, a maniac who spikes his water with LSD to be able to speak with his dead brother, wants to punish Elliot for successfully stealing his girl.

Kostas decides to kidnap the wife of Detective Inspector Lachlan Rogers (Herriman) in hopes that it will scare the decorated officer into doing his bidding. It does; Lachlan apprehends Elliot and kills a young sergeant in the process, becoming one of the bad guys. But is Elliot also a bad guy? Probationary Constable Helen Chambers (Macdonald), the ambitious cop-in-training assigned to his case, doesn’t think so. She believes the fact that he was willing to save her from being shot by Kostas’ henchman means there is good in there somewhere, even if he has done bad things. But Elliot isn’t convinced that someone can really change. 

After drinking from Kostas’ LSD-laced water bottle, he has visions that offer some insight into who he may have been. He sees his first meeting with Kostas, where he’s hired as his accountant. He is able to relive his meet-cute with Luci and sees how toxic their relationship was. He discovers where he buried the bag of money and dreams of laying in bed with Helen. He also speaks to a Russian woman named Lena Pascal, who he’s seen before in his dreams. She tells him she’s in Adelaide and claims that she can help him “fill in the colors” of his past. 

Elliot worries that what he has seen aren’t memories, but hallucinations. When he finds the bag of money in the same spot he had envisioned it though, he believes that Lena may be real, too. Unfortunately, he can’t go looking for her just yet. After Kostas and Luci are killed in a shootout over the million dollars, Lachlan lies to the police in hopes of saving himself. He claims that Elliot and Helen kidnapped him and went on a shooting rampage à la Bonnie and Clyde, killing the young sergeant. Luckily, Helen is able to access the CCTV footage that shows Lachlan transporting Elliot in handcuffs, catching him in his lie. It saves both her and Elliott from going to jail and allows Elliot a chance to speak with Lena, who was not a figment of his imagination—though after their chat he wishes she was.

When Lena comes to meet him at the jail, she reveals that he wasn’t just Kostas’ accountant as he had dreamt, but helped train the drug mules, mostly young immigrant women who swallowed bags of heroin to transport across the globe. Lena tells a story of two girls who died instantly after the bags Elliot gave them exploded in their stomachs. Lena lived, but not without literal scars. She shows him the long gash across her stomach where she was cut open to retrieve the drugs. She claims Elliot was the one who ordered her to be butchered, worried the heroin would go to waste. He apologizes for his cruelty, but she doesn’t absolve him of his guilt. “You have to live with yourself,” she tells him as she leaves.

Elliot doesn’t think he can and attempts to have himself arrested, but Lena won’t press charges. He then attempts to lose his memory again by getting into another car crash. He flips his car over, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work. He can’t forget what Lena told him and neither can Helen, who after learning the evil that Elliot was capable of decides she can no longer see him. But she can’t stop thinking about him and wondering whether he or anyone should be defined by their worst mistakes. 

Elliot wonders the same, but the guilt is just too much. He decides that he can no longer live with himself and attempts to take his life with vodka and pills. Laid out on his bed, waiting to die, he gets a text: a burrito emoji from Helen.

The burrito references a scene earlier in the show, when Elliot and Helen were eating together in a Mexican restaurant. Helen is his hostage, but the night plays out like a first date. Elliot can’t remember what kind of food he likes so she suggests they order everything on the menu so he can figure out his taste now. She encourages him to stop thinking about who he was and start becoming the person he is meant to be. He later tells her that he equates burritos with happiness and her text becomes a lifeline. He might not be able to forget what he’s done, but she believes he has the capacity to change. The joy on his face when he sees her message makes it seem as if Elliot finally believes he can change too. But fans will have to wait until Season 2 to see if he’s able to become a better person.

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The Tourist season two review: Jamie Dornan is back in one of the best British thrillers of recent years

Some of the tension is lost in this second run, which relocates the action to ireland, but it’s a worthwhile return for dornan’s enigmatic hero, article bookmarked.

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The man with no name, no family, no history, is an action movie staple. It evokes memories of Clint Eastwood staring down his enemies in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly , or Viggo Mortensen growling through the apocalyptic wasteland of The Road . It is a sure-fire route to a sense of mystery – who is he? What’s he doing here? – but it’s also a creative dead end. You cannot tantalise your viewers forever, and that’s the challenge for the second series of BBC One’s The Tourist , which picks up after the pieces begin to fall into place for our enigmatic hero.

After the ambiguous final moments of The Tourist ’s first season , viewers will be relieved to discover that Elliot ( Jamie Dornan ) is very much alive. In fact, he’s swanning around south Asia with his girlfriend Helen (Danielle Macdonald), who has sacked off her career as a police constable. After a difficult time in Australia (which involved a car crash, loss of memory, and about a dozen attempts on his life), Elliot thinks he’s safe. “Are you really, really – like 100 per cent – sure about that?” Helen asks. Well, of course not. And it takes about five minutes back in his Irish homeland before Elliot is kidnapped by masked goons.

If the first series was a fish-out-of-water thriller, calling to mind Robert A Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land , this second outing inverts the formula. If there is a tourist now, it’s Helen. For Elliot, this is a return to a native land where people know who he is – or, at least, who he was. “You sound like you’re a long way from home,” a local barkeep tells Helen. “Yeah,” she replies, “I am.” But where the show previously had to rely on the, rather tired, amnesiac trope in order to make Elliot’s discombobulation satisfying, Helen is a more natural tourist. She gallivants around the Irish countryside while Elliot tries to break free of his captors (who needle him with Saw -inspired challenges, such as cutting off his own legs, but played for laughs).

The Tourist has afforded an opportunity for Dornan to show exactly how woefully miscast he was as the icy, dominant Christian in the Fifty Shades franchise. Behind the good looks that saw him model for Calvin Klein in his early years, Dornan is better at projecting vulnerability than confidence. It’s what made his serial killer, Paul Spector, so chilling in The Fall : a cold-blooded killer gripped by a disarming unease with his place in the world. In The Tourist he is neither action hero nor lothario, just a man caught up in events like driftwood floating down the Lagan. “I tried once to end it all,” he tells one of his kidnappers. “But I’m ready to answer for the things that I’ve done.”

Mild-mannered men who are surprisingly au fait with violence and criminality – a genre spawned by Breaking Bad , with the baton passed first to Ozark , and now over to The Tourist – has become television’s most reliable archetype. The Tourist ’s newly expanded canvas gives more narrative control to Helen, which allows the fresh air of a more comic tone into proceedings. Searching for her kidnapped lover, she teams up with Conor MacNeill’s detective, who isn’t quite as normal a police officer as Helen was (to say the least). “I had to go and stick my big nose in it!” she exclaims, as things unravel beyond her control.

Where the original concept of The Tourist was neat and tidy – an unknown Northern Irishman wakes from a car accident in Australia, pursued by assassins whose motive eludes him – this second series is less clean. Ireland is a more familiar place than Australia (more like the Heinlein formula, where a Martian visits Earth), but the interpersonal dealings are more complex than ever. There’s an element of Hatfields and McCoys to the feud between two warring Irish crime dynasties (to one of which, Elliot may be the unwitting heir), which pushes the show away from the mystery genre (though the twists keep coming, with the regularity of a Tuscan highway) and towards the less interesting world of gangsters. In refocusing, something of the tension that typified the Antipodean season is lost.

All the same, The Tourist – which broadcasts on Stan in Australia and HBO in the US, as well as the BBC – is undoubtedly one of the best British thrillers of recent years. The combination of a very sexy protagonist, a slow-burning but believable romance (the chemistry between Dornan and Macdonald is, again, excellent), and stakes that get cranked higher and higher, make this a worthwhile second run. Now it’s no longer a blank slate – an unknown on the schedule – the show is less surprising, but The Tourist ’s return home still has the capacity to thrill.

‘The Tourist’ season two is on BBC One and BBC iPlayer at 9pm on 1 January 2024

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Review: 'The Tourist' is a ferocious thriller that relentlessly keeps you hanging on

Talk about a binge watch!

Talk about a binge watch! “The Tourist,” on HBO Max in a blast of six, one-hour episodes, is a ferocious thriller that’s also ferociously funny. Starring Jamie Dornan as an Irishman suffering amnesia in the Australian outback, the series is—to recoin a phrase—must-see TV.

The plot kicks in hard in Episode 1 as Dornan drives down a dusty road with a monster truck on his tail. Waking up battered and bruised in a hospital, he can’t even remember his name. Known only as “The Man” until the end of Episode 2, The Man—like Guy Pearce in “Memento”— must put together the puzzle of his life with crucial pieces missing.

“The Tourist” relentlessly keeps you hanging on. In the book world, they’d call it unputdownable. Each episode of the script by Jack and Harry Williams (“The Missing”) ends in a cliffhanger that whips you into the next episode. Forget about sleep.

It’s clear that Chris Sweeney (who directed episodes one to three) and Daniel Nettheim (who helmed the other half) have seen a lot of Coen brothers movies, especially “Fargo” and “Raising Arizona” with their deliciously deadpan blend of mirth and menace. If you’re going to borrow inspiration, why not swipe from the best.

MORE: Review: 'Licorice Pizza' one of the best films of the year

And Dornan, free from the cartoonish excess of the “Fifty Shades of Gray” trilogy, carries the whole thing with his starshine and burgeoning talent as an actor in “The Fall” and “Belfast.” Dornan is so good, you’ll follow him anywhere, which is just what “The Tourist” needs.

Dornan finds a perfect partner in Aussie dynamo Danielle Macdonald as Helen Chambers, a traffic cop with ambitions to rise in the ranks. The sweetness of Macdonald’s funny, touching and vital performance brings a nurturing humanity to the evil-doings surrounding her.

Can the diet-obsessed Helen, stuck with a controlling fiancée (Greg Larsen), discover herself by helping The Man recover his memory? Their attraction, repped by a burrito emoji, brings heart to a series that aims to blow the doors off with shocks and exploding violence.

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For instance, there’s the dude who keeps calling The Man while buried alive in a secret grave? And why does the detective inspector, played to the hilt by Damon Herriman, seem less reliable than the gangsters and drug dealers who occupy the periphery of the episodes?

MORE: Review: 'The Tender Bar' deals a winning hand

Truly terrifying is the best way to describe Ólafur Darri Ólafsson as Billy, the hulking American cowboy who drove The Man off the road and yet keeps comparing everyone he meets to his beloved mother. The scene between Billy and Helen will have you biting your nails to the quick.

And what of Shalom Brune-Franklin (“Line of Duty”) as Luci, the flirt who meets The Man at a diner that explodes minutes after they leave it. Luci volunteers to help The Man chase down his past. Or is she hiding something. Hint: Everyone in “The Tourist” is hiding something.

There’s no way I’ll spoil the fun by telling you who’s hiding what. Packed with high-voltage suspense and twists you don’t see coming, “The Tourist” also poses tangled questions about the nature of identify. You can tell The Man is afraid of what he might learn about himself.

Put yourself in his place, which is exactly what “The Tourist” wants you do. It’s one of the reasons this thrill-a-minute series has the staying power to haunt your dreams. The final episode is open-ended enough to suggest there might be a Season 2. Count me in.

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The Tourist

When a man wakes up in the Australian outback with no memory, he must use the few clues he has to discover his identity before his past catches up with him. When a man wakes up in the Australian outback with no memory, he must use the few clues he has to discover his identity before his past catches up with him. When a man wakes up in the Australian outback with no memory, he must use the few clues he has to discover his identity before his past catches up with him.

• Harry Williams
• Jack Williams
• Jamie Dornan
• Danielle Macdonald
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• 352 User reviews
• 42 Critic reviews
• 4 wins & 13 nominations total

Episodes 12

• Helen Chambers

• Lena Pascal

• Niamh Cassidy

• Detective Ruairi Slater

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• Orla McDonnell

• Donal McDonnell

• Frank McDonnell

• Detective Inspector Lachlan Rogers

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• Trivia The reason season 2 is set in Ireland was because Jamie Dorman didn't want to spend several month away in Australia again. The decision was made to relocate so Jamie could be close to his family
• Connections Featured in Jeremy Vine: Episode #5.5 (2022)

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The Tourist review – Jamie Dornan is explosive in this Memento-lite caper

This outback thriller from the writers of The Missing is fun, stylish and clearly still has many twists up its sleeve

A fter an … interesting few years on the big screen, appearing in the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise (as the suavely sadistic protagonist – a performance slightly undermined by the actor’s clear desire to climb out of his own skin to get away from it all) and Wild Mountain Thyme (as – well, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, but do look it up once you’re in your cups), Jamie Dornan is back on the small screen that gave him his breakthrough. Back then, he was compelling as the still, quiet, psychopathic serial killer Paul Spector in The Fall. Now he is equally compelling in a more action-packed role as a character known only as The Man in the new BBC One thriller The Tourist. It is the latest offering from the acclaimed writers of The Missing, Baptiste and Liar, Harry and Jack Williams, and – from the first of the six episodes, the only available for review – it looks set fair to measure up to their past successes.

We meet The Man travelling apparently without a care in the world across the Australian outback, until a Duel-ish truck appears behind him and starts trying to push him off the road. This is greeted by The Man less with shock than resignation – our first sign that The Man may not be quite the everyman he seems. He escapes by driving through a stand of trees but his relief is shortlived. The truck cannons into him from the side and he wakes up in hospital with no memory of who he is, how he got there or what his life was like before. Probationary officer Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald) is in charge of the case. You would be looking at her a long time before you were reminded of someone who ought to be responsible for an amnesiac man while investigating an unexplained car accident. Her main contribution so far is to let him go to a lunch appointment – according to the details written on a scrap of paper he finds in the clothes he was wearing when the accident occurred – at a diner 30 miles away on his own (and on crutches). The waitress, Luci (Shalom Brune-Franklin), spills lemonade on him. She is helping him to the loos outside when the diner explodes. They look back as smoke and debris fill the air. “Either I have the worst luck in the world,” says The Man, “or someone’s trying to kill me.” “To be fair,” replies Luci judiciously, “I think having someone trying to kill you would be the worst luck in the world.” In the aftermath, as the police tape up the site, they get a beer. “Fuck me, that’s lovely,” says The Man. “I hope I didn’t used to be an alcoholic.” The hour is peppered with humorous, humane moments like this, that keep an otherwise preposterous premise from exploding into smoke and debris itself.

The thick continues to plotten with the addition of scenes of a man buried alive somewhere in the outback (not gratuitously choking and awful, but no fun to watch if you’ve a scintilla of claustrophobia in you) with a ringing phone just out of reach, and a disposable camera is discovered at The Man’s crash site with photos of local landmarks, which puts him on the trail of his forgotten self. CCTV shows him buying a T-shirt and stuffed koala at a roadside shack. The shopkeeper told him how to get to the nearest garage and there is the koala – stuffed behind a bin along with a mobile phone. The final scene is him answering its ring. Guess who it is?

I’m not going to tell you because it’s well worth watching this fun, stylish and confident caper, which clearly still has numerous twists up its sleeve and characters to play with. The growing friendship between The Man and Helen – and the toxicity of her marriage currently being sketched in – promises to give the drama heart, too. Dornan is on fine form (and everyone who had begun to worry that they had hallucinated his acting ability in The Fall can sigh with relief and pat themselves on the back at the same time) and five more hours of this Memento-lite production should slip down as easily as The Man’s post-bomb beer. Lovely.

• Jamie Dornan

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There’s a way to make a movie like "The Tourist," but Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck doesn’t find that way. Here is a romantic comedy crossed with a crime thriller, shot in Paris and Venice, involving a glamorous mystery woman and a math teacher from Wisconsin. The plot is preposterous. So what you need is a movie that floats with bemusement above the cockamamie, and actors who tease each other.

As the mystery woman, Angelina Jolie does her darnedest. She gets the joke. Here is a movie in which she begins in a Paris cafe, eludes cops by dashing into the Metro, takes an overnight train to Venice, picks up a strange man ( Johnny Depp ) and checks them both into the Royal Danelli without one wrinkle on her dress or one hair out of place. And is sexy as hell. This is the Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly role, and she knows it.

Depp is in the Cary Grant role of the obliging, love-struck straight man who finds himself neck deep in somebody else’s troubles. In theory, these two should engage in witty flirtation and droll understatement. In practice, no one seems to have alerted Depp that the movie is a farce. I refer to farce in the dictionary sense, of course: a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations. Depp, however, plays his math teacher seriously and with a touch of the morose.

The plot involves — oh, hell, you know, the usual mystery man who has stolen millions from a gangster and gone into hiding while smuggling instructions to Jolie, his lover, instructing her to take the train to Venice, etc. And the cops from Scotland Yard who are tailing her in hopes of nailing the guy. And the gangster and his hit men who are also on the thief’s trail. And chases over the rooftops of Venice, dinner on a train, a scene in a casino, designer gowns and a chase through the canals with Jolie at the controls of a motor taxi, and...

Well, there was really only one cliche left, and I was grateful when it arrived. You know how a man in a high place will look down and see a canvas awning that might break his fall, and he jumps into it? Yep. And it’s shielding a fruit cart at the open-air market and he lands on the oranges and runs off, leaving the cart owner shaking his fist. This is a rare example of the Vertical Fruit Cart Scene, in which the cart is struck not from the side but from the top.

The supporting roles are filled by excellent actors, and it’s a sign of the movie’s haplessness that none of them make a mark. You have Paul Bettany and Timothy Dalton as cops, Steven Berkoff as the gangster and Rufus Sewell as "The Englishman," who must be important because he hangs around without any apparent purpose. Once in London, I saw Berkoff play a cockroach in his adaptation of Kafka’s "Metamorphosis." It might have helped if he’d tried the cockroach again.

A depressing element is how much talent "The Tourist" has behind the camera. Writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck made " The Lives of Others ," which won the 2007 Oscar for best foreign film. The screenplay is by Christopher McQuarrie (Oscar winner for " The Usual Suspects ") and Julian Fellowes (Oscar winner for " Gosford Park "), along with von Donnersmarck. It’s based on a French film written by Jerome Salle , which was nominated for a Cesar. All three "Tourist" writers seem to have used their awards as doorstops.

It doesn’t matter that the plot is absurd. That goes with the territory. But if it’s not going to be nonstop idiotic action, then the acting and dialogue need a little style and grace and kidding around. Jolie plays her femme fatale with flat-out, drop-dead sexuality. Depp plays his Wisconsin math teacher as a man waiting for the school bell to ring so he can go bowling. The other actors are concealed in the shadows of their archetypes. Cary Grant would have known how to treat a lady.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

The Tourist (2010)

Rated PG for violence and brief strong language

103 minutes

Paul Bettany as Acheson

Rufus Sewell as Englishman

Steven Berkoff as Ivan

Angelina Jolie as Elise

Johnny Depp as Frank

Timothy Dalton as Jones

Directed by

• Florian Henckel
• Christopher McQuarrie
• Julian Fellowes

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Manila Zoo Is the Philippines' Most Boring Tourist Attraction, Report Says

I f you went to school in Metro Manila in the '90s, chances are that one of the stops on your field trip is the Manila Zoo . Once a bustling hub of excitement and education, it has been recently labeled as one of the " most boring tourist attractions in the world ," according to a new study. The same survey lists Manila Zoo as the most boring tourist attraction in the Philippines.

How the 'Most Boring Tourist Attractions in the World' Were Identified

The study was conducted by Solitaired, an online platform where you can play a game of—well, solitaire. One can easily associate boredom with solitaire. It is, after all, one of the very few games that you can play on the computer in the early days of Windows. It's up there with Minesweeper, which only a few ever only understood.

Wild Animals Around the World Are Having a Blast Without Humans Around

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For this study that came out on April 8, 2024, Solitaired has identified the 100 most boring tourist attractions in the world based on a March 2024 analysis of 66.7 million Google reviews from over 3,200 popular tourist spots across 384 cities in 71 countries. It ranked these attractions by the frequency of boredom-related keywords found in the reviews. Words like "boring," "bored," "bore," "boredom," "tiresome," "dull," "drab," "lackluster," "lifeless," "mediocre," and "tedious" were tallied to create a "boredom score" for each location. The methodology also ensured that the focus on keywords are in a negative context by using natural language processing (NLP) and keyword-in-context (KWIC) analysis. Surprisingly, the United States dominated the list, with the top seven most boring attractions all located within its borders.

Topping the list is the Branson Scenic Railway in Branson, Missouri. This attraction offers a 40-mile round trip through part of the Ozark Mountains. Despite the promise of scenic views, reviewers were largely unimpressed, citing that the journey quickly became monotonous, offering little more than repetitive treetop views.

How Manila Zoo Fared in the List of Boring Tourist Attractions

Solitaired's study also gave a per-country selection. Type in "Philippines," and data reveals Manila Zoo as the country's most boring tourist attraction, with a boredom score of 1.50 in a range of zero to five. This information is culled from 5,091 reviews.

Manila Zoo (formerly Manila Zoological and Botanical Garden) has been around since July 25, 1959, during the term of Manila Mayor Arsenio Lacson. Its main attraction was the enclosure of Manila, a female Asian elephant given as a gift by the Sri Lankan government to former First Lady Imelda Marcos in 1981. Mali  was just 11 months old then. Her solitary existence since the death of another elephant, Shiva, in 1990, raised concerns among animal rights advocates who argued that her living conditions were inadequate.

The plight of Mali  caught the attention of several high-profile figures who advocated for her transfer to an elephant sanctuary. Despite these appeals, zoo authorities maintained that Mali was best kept in captivity, contending that she had never known life in the wild and might not survive a transition. Mali died on November 28, 2023, after more than four decades in captivity.

Aside from the alleged poor treatment of Mali, Manila Zoo was under fire on several other occasions. One was in the 2000s as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals called for the closure of zoos around the world; then in 2019, when it temporarily stopped its operations after the Department of Environment and Natural Resources found that it was dumping untreated sewage into Manila Bay. A P1.7-billion rehabilitation started in July 2020, then it was reopened to the public on December 30, 2021.

The renovated facility now features modernized enclosures with transparent glass, elevated viewing decks and pathways surrounded by plants, a dancing fountain, and even mini-falls and a manmade lagoon.

Flora and fauna are also separated into larger spaces, including the Animal Museum, Botanical Garden, Butterfly Garden, and Endemic Animals. Additional amenities include spacious restrooms, more food stalls, drinking fountains, parking areas, and benches. It is also noted that the new Manila Zoo has its own sewage treatment plant.

Despite these improvements, reviews on TripAdvisor reflected opposite sentiments (likely from pre-renovation visits to the zoo). Many users expressed disappointment over the zoo's state. One user mentioned that the enclosures seemed too small for the animals, while another pointed out that the facilities appeared to be poorly maintained.

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Man known for 23 years as Conception Bay John Doe identified as a Cuban in Canada on a tourist visa

Remains were discovered at a dump site near st. john’s in 2001.

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WARNING: This story contains graphic details some readers may find disturbing. 

The man who became known as Conception Bay John Doe after his severed head was found buried in a dump site 23 years ago has been identified by the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary as a Cuban who came to Canada on a tourist visa, The Fifth Estate has learned.

Temistocle Casas was identified through genetic genealogy that led investigators to his first cousin, police said.

RNC Const. Greg Davis said he will never forget the moment he learned Casas's name and saw his photo for the first time. 

"'Surreal' I guess would be the word to use. I couldn't believe it had happened," Davis said. "I always knew it was possible but I didn't know if we were going to get there.… My head was spinning, it was a crazy moment." 

Two men looking for tree saplings discovered Casas's remains in a Billy Boot garbage bag in a dump site in Conception Bay, near St. John's, in 2001. 

He had been known as Conception Bay John Doe since then. 

After the remains were discovered, police said the victim probably lived in Quebec or Ontario or possibly the northeastern United States. Through isotope analysis and carbon dates, it was established that he was probably born in the late 1950s or early 1960s.

However, the RNC has now told The Fifth Estate they don't believe Casas ever lived in the U.S. They said he came to Montreal on a tourist visa in 1992. 

It is not known how Casas ended up in Newfoundland. 

"Through our investigation, we believe Mr. Casas was killed in 1997 or 1998," said Davis. "We're not going to disclose any more details at this time since it is an active homicide investigation."

The Fifth Estate was not able to find any records indicating Casas became a Canadian citizen. 

Three years ago, the RNC began using genetic genealogy — when DNA is used to do family tree research — to try to identify the man. But any matches made with relatives had been too distant to make an identification, according to the RNC.  

Then, in February, a man from the U.S. uploaded his DNA. He turned out to be Casas's first cousin.

Investigative dead ends

In 2001, when the RNC held a news conference about the case, they said they believed the man was killed sometime between 1994 and 1997, but they would not disclose the cause of death, saying it would compromise their investigation. They did confirm that he was a victim of homicide.

Over the past two decades, the RNC pursued several avenues to try to crack open the case. They held media conferences, used isotope analysis, submitted the unknown man's DNA to the national DNA data bank for the missing and unidentified and sent his dental records to authorities in the U.S.  

It was all to no avail. 

In 2001, the RNC concluded that the skull, which had shoulder-length black, curly hair, belonged to a male between the ages of 20 and 40. 

It was not possible to determine other physical features like height because the rest of the man's remains have never been found.   

In 2021, the RNC decided to pursue genetic genealogy. It has become a popular tool for policing agencies to try to identify John and Jane Does, but it only works if a close relative of the dead person enters their DNA into a public family tree database. 

• It's an 'exciting time' for DNA genealogy in solving cold cases, experts say. But some urge caution
• Genetic genealogy is cracking cases once thought unsolvable. Not all police forces can afford to use it

Identification becomes more difficult if the unknown person comes from an ethnic community that doesn't typically pursue family tree research. That was the challenge in this case, according to police.  

Casas's DNA profile was uploaded into GEDmatch, a public database of profiles from different family tree databases, in February 2022. His identity was confirmed in April after a DNA match with a family member.  

"Personally, I am relieved that we are at this point. I never knew that we'd get to the point where we'd have an identity. I knew the technology was there to identify him but I didn't know if it would work because of the Cuban ancestry," said Davis.

Casas arrived in Canada from Cuba on April 1, 1992. The RNC have not been able to find any records of Casas travelling to Newfoundland and Labrador.

"I beg anyone out there who is reading this story that if you know any information to contact us," said Davis. 

"We are back to Square 1. In a normal [homicide], you know who the victim is from the start. We only learned his name 23 years later, so now I feel that in a lot of ways we're only now starting a homicide investigation, even though we put great effort into this file for over two decades."  

If you have any information about this case, please call 416-205-6679 or write to us at [email protected] . 

With files from Ivan Angelovski

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The Tourist

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The scenery and the stars are undeniably beautiful, but they can't make up for The Tourist 's slow, muddled plot, or the lack of chemistry between Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.

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