Widow’s Bay Review: Matthew Rhys, Rosemary’s Mouth, and the Island I’d Actually Move To

This Widow’s Bay review is late and I don’t care. Apple’s horror-comedy took 19 Emmy nominations, the internet has already told you it’s good, and none of that is the interesting part. The interesting part is that I’d be on the next ferry. Fuck Martha’s Vineyard.

I’m not breaking news here. I’m a man who watched ten episodes and has opinions, which is most reviews anyway, just without the screener.

Matthew Rhys Is Having the Year of His Life

He’s nominated twice this year. Loftis here, and the sinister neighbour opposite Claire Danes in The Beast in Me — the sexy red flag next door, the man you’d let in and shouldn’t.

Same actor, same cycle, opposite ends of the human animal. And he’s doing the same thing in both. Rhys holds two frequencies at once — the warmth, and the thing under it. In The Beast in Me you get the charm first, the danger second. Loftis flips it. You clock him as a hustler with a bad pitch, and three episodes later you understand he’s a man carrying something for twenty years who’d rather sell you a beach.

That’s the joke of him. He’s not peddling the ghosts. He’s peddling the idyll — sunsets, oysters, come for the weekend — while the island leaks horror out of every seam behind him. He wants Widow’s Bay to be nowhere in particular. It refuses.

Episode one hands you the whole thesis in one prop. Loftis flips through a wall calendar to check dates for a travel writer’s visit — and it’s a wolf calendar, because of course it is, who owns a wolf calendar — month after month of wolves howling and staring, perfectly normal creepy-uncle stuff, until July, which is just a photograph of an overturned white car wrecked on an empty road. No comment. No reaction. He keeps flipping. That’s the show: the idyll holds right up until it doesn’t, and nobody on this island finds that strange.

He won for The Americans playing a man who was entirely performance. Loftis is the same instrument in a different key, and Rhys should walk it in a wide-open comedy category.

Loftis isn’t selling you the ghosts. He’s selling you the sunsets, while the island leaks horror out of every seam behind him.

Patricia Is the Season

Rhys is the reason you start. Patricia is the reason you don’t stop.

Kate O’Flynn plays the town hall assistant, the social disaster, the woman who survived the Boogeyman’s spree in high school and has spent thirty years being called a liar for it. Chief mean girl Kris still tells her to stop making it about herself. That’s a lot to hang on a comedy character, and O’Flynn carries all of it while being the funniest person on screen.

“Beach Reads” is where you get it. Patricia finds a self-help book in her mobile library donation bin, author credited as Lucy Fours. Say it out loud. The show never stops to explain it, which is the most confident thing it does all season.

Emboldened, she throws a Sunset Cocktails night at the Salty Whale. Official town event, real mission: prove to the high school bitches that she’s cool, that she has friends, that she can throw a party. It goes badly. It goes magnificently badly. Dale’s on the decks running the set off a free Spotify trial, so the ads play, mid-party — because that’s the exact texture of a town where nobody has enough money or enough shame to fix the problem.

And O’Flynn plays every second of it with the face of someone who knows it’s collapsing and has decided to keep going anyway. Nothing on TV this year was more painful to sit through. I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Nothing in horror hits harder than social anxiety.

Episode eight is where she stops being funny-sad and starts being the best thing on television. The Boogeyman comes back. For her. Specifically.

I won’t walk you through it — it’s one of the best hours of TV this year and you deserve to meet it cold. But: at the peak of a genuinely tense home invasion, mid-hunt, knife-wielding maniac in play, Kris gets what’s coming to her, and Patricia — running for her life — stops to say “She’s the worst. She’s the fucking worst.”

Straight-faced 80s slasher. Real dread. A punchline from a woman mid-chase. Nobody else on television is landing that, and most aren’t stupid enough to try.

Then there’s Rosemary. Dale Dickey got called the “less-expected” nomination and everyone moved on, which tells me none of them sat through her genealogy presentation. Rosemary is the town’s amateur genealogist, hunting for the last living descendant of the family that started all this — and she delivers her findings on an overhead projector, generation by generation, in the flat voice of a county clerk reading minutes. Branch after branch dies in front of you: “Dead baby. Dead baby. Lesbian.” That last one isn’t a death, by the way. In Rosemary’s genealogical method, a spinster is simply a dead end — no descendants here, moving on. Nobody corrects her. Nobody reacts. Dickey doesn’t wink. It’s the driest thirty seconds of the year and I had to pause the episode.

The whole town runs at that frequency. The museum curator, walking visitors through the island’s witch trials, isn’t solemn about it — she’s proud. They hunted ’em, and they got ’em. It’s delivered like a plaque commemorating a winning season. Off-island that’s a scandal. Here it’s heritage.

I’m Buying the Horror They’re Selling

Every critic read this as satire. The mayor from Jaws, but tourism. The pitch is the joke.

The pitch works on me.

Not ironically. A man stood in front of a town with a documented body count and said this could be the next Martha’s Vineyard, and I thought: yes, and I’d like a room.

Because look what he’s actually got. An amateur genealogist projecting your dead relatives onto a wall. A museum that brags about its witch trials. A mobile library with a grimoire in the donation bin. A bar called the Salty Whale, a DJ who won’t spring for premium, a mayor who loves the place enough to lie about it, and a woman who’s survived the local Boogeyman twice and still turns up to work at town hall.

Martha’s Vineyard has a ferry queue and people from Connecticut.

Loftis isn’t wrong about his island. He’s wrong about the copy. He keeps selling beaches while sitting on the only place in New England where any of this is happening.

Get me on the ferry, Tom. I know what happens. Coming anyway.

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Image credits: Widow’s Bay (Apple TV+)