I’m sceptical of remakes, but this new version of Cape Fear is incredible – and terrifying

I’m always sceptical of a TV series that stretches out a film-length story to 10 episodes, but this new adaptation of John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners – which was first made into a 1962 film starring Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck, and again in 1991 starring Nick Nolte and Robert De Niro – is a slick, clever update of the original.

With Martin Scorsese (who directed the 1991 film) and Steven Spielberg as executive directors, it’s no surprise this is a big-budget affair, and it looks incredible.

Once again set in Georgia, there are two attorneys who now are the target of the newly released con Max Cady. Anna Bowden (Amy Adams, most recently seen in Nightbitch) and her husband Tom (Fargo’s Patrick Wilson) were Cady’s respective defence lawyer and prosecutor. They met during Cady’s trial 17 years earlier for the murder of his wife and unborn child. (The icky rapist themes of the ’91 version have been changed.)

Anna now works for a non-profit organisation – alongside her boss Noa (C.C.H. Pounder) – that re-examines death row prisoners’ cases, and works to free the wrongly convicted. Tom is still a slightly slimy prosecutor, and with their two teenage children, Natalie (Lily Collias), whose dad is from a previous relationship, and Zack (Joe Anders, son of Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes), they live a fabulous life in an opulent house in Savannah, surrounded by lush southern oak trees dripping in Spanish moss.

But life isn’t as perfect as it seems: Tom is on the verge of having an affair, Zach has been isolated from school and friends after uploading intimate photos of his former girlfriend, and Natalie feels that her parents’ attention is solely devoted to her troubled brother.

But these woes seem trivial once Max Cady, played with unnerving gusto by bad-guy specialist Javier Bardem, is released from prison. Max wastes little time with terrorising the family, but he does so – as a TV series-length allows – incrementally.

He first runs into Anna and Tom at an event for one of Anna’s newly released prisoners, where he makes a speech to much applause, and assures the pair he holds no grudges. But boy, does he hold grudges.

Adapted by writer/producer Nick Antosca (The Act, Brand New Cherry Flavour), this version of Cape Fear is an unusual marriage of the original source material and the modern; the soundtrack from the 1962 film – also used, in rearranged form, for the ’91 version – remains the same, and much of the cinematography, like the original film, is Hitchcockian in style. There’s not a drone shot in sight and the colour palette – all bl