Olivier Assayas returned to territory he first explored in his 1996 film to create HBO’s Irma Vep, an eight-episode limited series that functions as both a remake of and a meditation on his earlier work. Alicia Vikander stars as Mira, an American movie star who travels to France to appear in a new adaptation of Louis Feuillade’s 1915 silent serial Les Vampires, directed by a filmmaker named Rene Vidal, played by Vincent Macaigne. What follows is a story about stories, about the tension between art and commerce, about whether adaptation is creation or destruction, and about a woman quietly coming apart in a foreign city.
The show premiered in June 2022 to strong critical reception and modest viewership, which is roughly the response you’d expect for an Assayas project on HBO. It’s a show that assumes a certain level of film literacy from its audience and rewards that assumption generously, while also working as a character study and a backstage comedy on its own terms.
Vikander’s Transformation and Assayas’s Vision
Vikander is extraordinary here. Mira arrives in Paris fresh from a breakup and immediately enters a production that’s chaotic, underfunded, and run by a director having a creative and personal crisis. Vikander plays the disconnect between Mira’s movie-star composure and her internal turbulence with remarkable subtlety, letting cracks appear in moments rather than scenes. As the shoot progresses and Mira begins to merge with her character, the silent film vampire Irma Vep, Vikander layers the performance with increasingly ambiguous boundaries between actress and role.
Assayas directs with the confidence of someone who has spent decades thinking about these exact questions. His camera moves through the film set with an insider’s familiarity, capturing the specific rhythms of a troubled production: the whispered conferences, the last-minute rewrites, the actors waiting in costume while the director stares at a monitor in private anguish. The show evokes the feeling of making art without romanticizing it, presenting creativity as an often uncomfortable, sometimes absurd process.
The show’s engagement with film history is one of its distinguishing pleasures. Assayas weaves references to silent cinema, the French New Wave, Hong Kong action films, and contemporary superhero franchises into a conversation about what cinema has been and what it’s becoming. These references never feel like homework assignments. They emerge naturally from characters who live and breathe film, and they enrich the show’s central theme without overwhelming it.
The supporting cast brings the French film industry to vivid life. Vincent Macaigne’s Rene is a portrait of artistic ambition collapsing under its own weight, and his scenes with Vikander have a charged, unstable quality. The crew members, producers, and assorted industry figures who populate the margins create a convincing ecosystem of ambition, compromise, and creative passion.
The Deliberate Pace and Its Costs
Irma Vep moves slowly, and it’s not apologetic about it. Assayas lets scenes breathe, allows conversations to meander, and trusts that the accumulation of small moments will build something greater than any individual plot point. For viewers attuned to this rhythm, the show becomes hypnotic. For those expecting a more conventional narrative structure, it can feel aimless, particularly in the middle episodes where the line between thematic exploration and wheel-spinning gets blurry.
The show’s deep engagement with cinema history is a double-edged quality. Viewers who share Assayas’s passion for film will find richness in every reference and connection. Those without that background may feel excluded from conversations they can sense are meaningful but can’t fully access. The show doesn’t condescend to explain itself, which is admirable but limiting.
Mira’s personal life, including romantic entanglements and professional anxieties, doesn’t always generate the dramatic tension that the show seems to expect from it. Some of these storylines feel like they exist primarily to give Vikander emotional material to work with between the more compelling meta-fictional elements. The balance between Mira-as-person and Mira-as-metaphor-for-cinema tilts back and forth, and it’s more interesting on the metaphorical side.
The finale pushes into surreal territory that will either enchant or alienate. Assayas blurs the boundaries between Mira’s reality and the silent film she’s appearing in, and the result is visually striking but narratively ambiguous in ways that resist easy interpretation. It’s a bold ending that trusts its audience to sit with uncertainty, but some viewers wanted more resolution than they received.
Cinema Eating Itself
The central question Irma Vep keeps circling is whether it’s possible to create something truly new by remaking something old. Rene’s attempt to reimagine a 1915 serial for contemporary audiences mirrors Assayas’s own act of remaking his 1996 film as a television series. The layers of self-reference could easily become suffocating, but Assayas navigates them with enough humor and self-awareness to keep the project from disappearing into its own navel. The show acknowledges the absurdity of its own existence while still arguing that the attempt to connect past and present through art is worth making.
Should You Watch Irma Vep?
If you love cinema, if you’re interested in the creative process, or if you want to see Alicia Vikander give one of the best performances of her career, Irma Vep is essential. It’s a show that treats its audience as intelligent and curious, and it rewards that trust with insights and pleasures that feel exceedingly rare on television.
Skip it if slow pacing, art-house sensibilities, and heavy film references aren’t your thing. This is not a show that’s interested in hooking you with plot. It’s interested in immersing you in a world and a set of ideas, and if those ideas don’t engage you naturally, the eight episodes will feel very long.
The Verdict on Irma Vep
Irma Vep is one of the most distinctive series HBO has produced in recent years, a deeply personal project from a master filmmaker working at the peak of his powers. Vikander’s performance is a career highlight, the direction is confident and inventive, and the show’s love for cinema is infectious even when its pacing tests your patience. It’s not for everyone, and it knows it. But for the audience it’s made for, there’s nothing else quite like it.