Vague Visages’ The Veil review contains minor spoilers. Steven Knight’s 2024 FX on Hulu miniseries features Elisabeth Moss, James Purefoy and Yumna Marwan. Check out the VV home page for more TV reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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Thanks to creator Steven Knight and star Elisabeth Moss, the FX on Hulu limited series The Veil is structured as a showcase for spycraft brilliance — specifically, the talent of the lead actress’ British intelligence agent Imogen Salter. The protogonist receives an assignment from her French colleague (and lover), Malik Amar (Dali Benssalah), to track down and extract information from a French-Algerian woman who claims her name is Adilah El Idrissi (Yumna Marwan), but who may actually be the feared “Genie of Raqqah,” a supposed ruthless leader of a breakaway ISIS faction.

In a Syrian refugee camp, Adilah claims that she’s a French citizen who was lured into ISIS with false promises, and that she never killed anyone. The woman just wants to reunite with her 10-year-old daughter, and Imogen presents herself as a resourceful aid worker who can make that happen. Both of the characters lie to each other, which makes for a delicate game of deception and alliance.

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“You can’t keep going rogue,” Malik says to Imogen in The Veil’s third episode — a guarantee that Moss’ character will continue working on her own, since that’s the only way she gets the job done. In that sense, the series protagonist often recalls Claire Danes’ volatile superspy Carrie Mathison from Homeland (2011-2020). Like the popular Showtime character, Imogen may also be emotionally invested in her target, but that closeness is exactly what makes her good at her job. 

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In the four episodes available for review (out of six total), The Veil travels from Syria to Turkey to Bulgaria to Paris, where multiple intelligence agencies converge to look for Adilah. That pits Malik against American CIA agent Max Peterson (Josh Charles), described by an agency supervisor as “the most American American America has ever produced.” 

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Charles takes that description to heart, as Max is obnoxious and condescending, full of tired insults based on stereotypes about the French. He sometimes seems imported from a broader, more satirical show, but once he has the chance to interact with Imogen in the later part of the season, he fits more smoothly into The Veil’s story.

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Despite Max and Malik’s strenuous efforts, both characters remain on the outside of the operation, constantly rebuffed and outsmarted when they attempt to tell Imogen what to do. Moss effectively balances her performance between effortless competence and frayed vulnerability, and periodic ominous flashbacks to Imogen’s childhood — featuring a man (James Purefoy) who may be her father — suggest some dark secrets that will presumably be revealed by the end of the series.

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It’s helpful to hold onto something genuine in those secrets, because so much of The Veil is built on obfuscation that it can be tough to get invested in characters who never tell the truth about anything. Imogen isn’t even the protagonist’s real name; she requests the moniker as a cover identity after the conclusion of an unrelated operation at the beginning of the first episode. Adilah probably isn’t a real name, either, and the details shared about the characters’ pasts are a mix of half-truths and fabrications.

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That’s standard stuff for an espionage drama, and Knight, who wrote all six episodes of The Veil, isn’t out to reinvent the genre. Beyond Homeland’s Carrie Mathison, there’s a long history of spy characters who lose themselves in their assumed identities, blurring the lines between target and collaborator. Despite the contemporary references to ISIS and the ongoing refugee crisis, there’s nothing particularly timely about The Veil, and any relevant social commentary is incidental. It’s a drama about two wary, dangerous women finding common ground as they navigate international intrigue with potentially deadly consequences.

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The Veil is light on those consequences at first, and even when Imogen’s superiors discover that the Genie of Raqqah is planning an attack that could kill thousands of people, the sense of urgency is muted. It’s more important for the protagonist and Adilah to have time to spend together sipping martinis in bars and trading stories about their damaged pasts. Moss and Marwan have the right chemistry for that, and The Veil isn’t about big action scenes, although there is a well-staged chase on the streets of Istanbul in the second episode.

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Presumably, there are major revelations to come in The Veil’s final two episodes, but the FX on Hulu miniseries may not bring the pieces of its various mysteries together in a satisfying fashion. As the creators of Homeland learned, there’s a fine line between a fascinatingly flawed heroine and a potentially reductive, sexist portrayal of a woman in a demanding, male-dominated field. And so the content of The Veil’s flashback scenes could tip Imogen toward the wrong side of that line. 

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Still, there’s every reason to believe that Moss can find the genuine humanity in any kind of clichéd trauma, just as she has in her excellent performances in series and films like Mad Men (2007-15), Top of the Lake (2013-17) and The Invisible Man (2020). Thus far, the brazen, devious Imogen seems like a worthy counterpart to Moss’ past characters, as The Veil is an exciting, fast-paced thriller that finds a perfect place for the lead actress.

Josh Bell (@signalbleed) is a freelance writer and movie/TV critic based in Las Vegas. He’s the former film editor of Las Vegas Weekly and has written about movies and pop culture for Syfy Wire, Polygon, CBR, Film Racket, Observer and more. With comedian Jason Harris, he co-hosts the podcast Awesome Movie Year.

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