"Between the Stairs": the female corpse under the stairs, not just the victim

"The Staircase" tells the story of an unsolved case in North Carolina. On the evening of December 8, 2001, Katherine Peterson was found collapsed in a pool of blood under the stairs of her home. Did he accidentally fall to his death, was pushed down the stairs, or was beaten to death by an object? The case has been entangled in judicial proceedings for more than ten years. Until 2017, Mike Peterson, who pleaded guilty to intentional homicide, was freed after his sentence had expired, and the truth was still kept in the dark.

"Between the Stairs" poster

HBO's eight-episode miniseries "Between the Stairs" is not the first film and television work in the case. There was a documentary made by a French team, which caused controversy because of the love affair between female editor Sophie Brunet and Mike Peterson in prison (the relationship was quite long). The TV series "Between the Stairs" also put Sophie and the French photography team into the plot, allowing the people behind the camera to walk into the camera. Sophie, played by Juliette Binoche, goes from believing that Mike is innocent to being suspicious. She is like the twin flower of the deceased Katherine Peterson (Tony Collette) in this world, and she has retraced Katherine's love path.

"Between the Stairs" stills

The play adopts the method of spiral advancement. It seems that the higher it goes up, the closer it gets to the bright sky, but in fact it is going down to a bottomless pit. The moment on the evening of December 8 is the origin that divides life and death and changes the trajectory of many people's lives. What happened at this moment? The director shot several different methods of death based on different theories, all of which suppressed the bloodshed. Katherine Peterson's last life was cut into small pieces and presented piece by piece like a hiker's mark, piecing together the last life of a woman.
At the other end of the origin is everything that happens after death. Reconnaissance, restoration of the scene, court trial, and prison life have destroyed the Peterson family without any suspense. The Petersons have five grown-up children, none of which they have together. They also have several siblings of their own. Catherine prepares and yearns for a perfect Christmas, the last Christmas for this extended family.

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Every family has since fallen apart. Among their five children, some believe that their father is innocent, and some believe that their father killed their mother. Katherine's sisters identified Mike as the murderer after prosecutors presented evidence. In Peterson's original family, which has not been fully shown in the play, his sister has supported him to doubt him, and his two brothers still support him. For more than ten years, the mother and father of this family died of dementia, and they lost their closeness and unity forever.
Because of the continuing lack of overwhelming evidence to convict Peterson, what happened that night will remain a mystery until one day he admits that he caused Katherine's death. In such a factual premise, the focus cannot be on the truth, but on the process of arriving at the truth, and the human nature that we can perceive along the way.

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The "most complex and exciting" Mike Kathleen called the audience was a far cry from her description. Colin Firth's Mike Peterson looks more feminine than real. The years have made Phils more and more like an old lady. He is the favorite type of hero in American crime dramas, white, wealthy, well-educated, and socially adept. But his jokes show a bad-tempered tail, and his tolerance and support for others are under the shadow of a desire for control. Mike is a liar, has no moral burden for it, and only shows guilt when he is caught. His "successful" life did not stand up to scrutiny. Although she is a novelist, Catherine, who mainly depends on her wealthy life as an executive of a listed company. Before Katherine's death, the family's financial situation was already precarious. Shortly before her death, shares of Nortel Networks, where she worked, plummeted. Catherine's personal shares evaporated millions of dollars in one day, and the Paris retirement plan disappeared in an instant.
The further the plot progresses, the clearer Mike Peterson's image becomes. "Between the Stairs" never thought of "objectively presenting a pending case". The screenwriter, like Sophie Brunette, developed a firm opinion on the characters after seeing the material. Their Mike, even if it had nothing to do with Katherine's death, was anything but good. He doesn't necessarily have the intention to murder others, but he is really an extremely selfish "unintentional person". This man has only a very strong sexual desire (hidden secrets in the computer), but he can't see who he has real love for. Generosity is the shell of Mike's showing. When it really irritated him, he would drop this thin shell and become another person. Upbringing, wit, and wisdom were all ineffective, and his anger was sinister and vicious.

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In the morality trial of the TV series, Mike is guilty. But since such characters are not uncommon on screen, the really interesting character is not him, but Catherine. Catherine is very similar to the combination of Lynette (Felicity Hoffman) and Brie (Marcia Krause) in "Desperate Housewives" (Desperate Housewives). People around you are under your own wings. Because of Katherine, the five children of the Peterson family were able to love each other like brothers and sisters. They both love Katherine. Catherine was like their real mother, so they knew instinctively that the miserable Christmas after Catherine's death would be the last one to be spent together.

"Between the Stairs" stills

There are also many middle-aged female characters tormented by pressure, including Kate Winslet's brilliant role in "Mare of Easttown" last year. But they are seldom like Catherine, who starts out as a corpse.
Catherine's life is like a wood-framed old town on fire. She was filmed several times turning on the tape recorder and playing a meditation session. One, two, three, four, it gets interrupted every time. Katherine is a lone drowning man. She went to the mall for the last time before she died, picking out Christmas gifts for her daughter in front of the watch case. The camera moves to her lower body, wearing a pair of white sneakers on her stockings, which is completely different from the upper body dressed by the professional elite.
The Christmas after Katherine's death in the first episode, her daughter mustered the courage to open the gift box and was disappointed to find that the watch wasn't the one she wanted. In the penultimate episode, Katherine's timeline is approaching the last minute. Because the stock plummeted and the year-end bonus was cancelled, her financial situation plummeted, and she had no choice but to choose a cheap watch that her daughter didn't want as a gift in front of the watch cabinet. On this day, luck finally favored her once. Mike received a call from his agent and gave her the good news that "a novel was bought by a major Hollywood production and received a $10,000 advance payment". "Now I can buy her the watch she wants," Catherine breathed a sigh of relief after hearing the news.
Catherine evokes our sense of the burdens of life and is empathetic. She is a real person, and the scene where she finally packs her gear and rushes to the attic to fight the bats is like a snapshot of her life. She has been ups and downs, neglected to take care of herself, and pushed herself to exhaustion. The audience believes that she, like Lynette, is an invincible fighter, and neither the workplace nor the family can destroy such a female warrior. What's more, this female warrior has a good heart and is the strong backing of everyone around her. Everyone acquiesced in their hearts that anyone could suffer misfortune, but it would not be Catherine. Even if she fell, she would struggle to get up, stop the bleeding with a towel, and tell others about this unfortunate incident as a joke in the future.
If Katherine didn't die, the life of the Petersons would be great to see on TV. But it would be a family soap opera revolving around debt, lies and stress. Catherine's death showed how fragile a family that seemed indestructible was. It is also the story of a family. Soap operas always tell about the toughness of the family. No matter the wind or the rain, there is always a bond that binds the members together. Even if someone is lying in the grave, the other members will dress up neatly and fly to the grave like crows to mourn. Dead members will live on in countless flashbacks (and even narrations) to come.
And once the family drama becomes a crime drama, it turns to focus on the fragility of the family. Peterson's family myth is busted in the first episode, and only lies within lies. The truth shrinks into a hard seed, and I don't know when it will see the light of day. The mansion was auctioned off quickly (because it was a haunted house and no one was interested in it), and the house was filled with friends in an instant. An expensive college student left school to find a job in customer service. Fortunately, the brothers and sisters still have a sense of humour. When they learn about the new job of Martha (played by Odessa Young), who is a thorny personality, she eats fast food and feels funny. Everyone looked at each other and smiled, and at that moment, they felt that something that kept the family together was still there.
The line of solving cases and justice is relatively dull. The prosecutor and the female assistant said a lot of righteous words, but they were like law enforcement officers in the country, who did not turn their minds on Mike Peterson's guilt from the first moment. The proposal of new theories one after another did not clear the fog, but painted the unsolved cases with the color of urban legends.

"Between the Stairs" stills

Juliette Binoche's line of female editors is also lackluster. She and Mike have no chemistry. It is also reluctant to use "she is French, love came so suddenly" to understand her love. It's hard to believe that a French beauty whose favorite reading as a child was "Reminiscence of the Time Is Like Water" would fall in love with Mike Peterson, whom he had never met, in the process of editing the material. The show features some mediocre prison correspondence and a few meetings. Perhaps it was the relationship between Bystander Qing, Mike's play-by-play with Katherine, and later with Sophie, has succeeded repeatedly, which is unconvincing. Sophie, who has been trapped in love hysteria for a long time, even if the actor Juliette Binoche is still like a shining mermaid, she will inevitably lose weight because of the oily body of her love opponent.
So "Between the Stairs" is more of a family drama than a crime drama. It keeps asking "If this or that is lost, will this family still exist, are you still you?"
As the finale looms, we'll only be more reluctant to part with Katherine. Because the end of the fog is still the fog, but there is no Katherine at the end of the fog. Tony Collette did what she wanted in the role: a voice for the voiceless. She made the audience shudder. Seeing that a family was shattered like porcelain, she remembered that she should take more care of herself.