SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “The Executioners,” the finale of “Cape Fear,” now streaming on Apple TV.
In the final moments of “Cape Fear,” Anna Bowden realizes that she’ll never truly be free of the man who’s been stalking her family.
The Bowden family has defeated Max Cady (Javier Bardem), the ex-convict who blames Anna (Amy Adams) and her husband Tom (Patrick Wilson) for his incarceration, in an epic battle during which he invaded their home, placed Anna and Tom on “trial” for colluding against him and threatened their children Natalie and Zack (Lily Collias and Joe Anders).
During that intense confrontation, Anna stunned Max with evidence she obtained at his family’s houseboat that his sister Crystal (Juliette Lewis, who also starred as a different character in the 1991 film version of this story) actually committed the murder for which Max was convicted, having killed Max’s pregnant wife, ripping the unborn fetus from her body. Max’s child actually lived, growing nearly into adulthood while Max spent his life mourning him; in a bitter irony, Max killed him in the chaos that ensued at the Cady family boat at the start of the finale. It’s our definitive proof, too, that Max never did what Tom, as prosecutor, put him away for, and Anna, as defense attorney, didn’t block. For all his crimes against the Bowdens, Max began his legal journey as an innocent man.
Javier Bardem in ‘Cape Fear.’ (Apple TV)
By the time he’s defeated, Max seems utterly broken; the last we see of this seemingly invulnerable agent of chaos is his sputtering out water on the Bowdens’ deck, ready to be apprehended by the authorities. But the family’s victory is only conditional. After Anna declares, “Let him die in a cage,” sparing Max’s life, we jump ahead in time to a backyard barbecue, echoing the one that, in happier times, opened the series. Back then, the Bowdens were surrounded by friends, but here, it’s only the four family members, trapped in their fortress. We see Natalie watching a true-crime influencer’s video shot just outside their front door before she joins the rest.
As Tom prepares their meal, he glances nervously over his shoulder, toward the pool where he nearly died; Zack sits in eerie silence while his parents force bonhomie, joking about keeping the secret of how good his cheeseburgers are. After Tom refers to Anna as a “psychopath” for ordering her burger without cheese, lettuce, or bun, she declares, “Guilty” — and the verbal reminder of just what they’ve suffered through, and how similar they may be to the guilty psychopath they defeated, overcomes Anna’s defenses. She looks over her shoulder, her face beginning to twist in agony and fear, as the film suddenly shifts to a bright-red filter: End of series, though not of Anna’s psychological journey.
Nick Antosca created this version of “Cape Fear” — the third onscreen adaptation of John D. MacDonald’s novel “The Executioners,” following big-screen takes in 1962 and 1991 — and co-wrote the finale. He spoke to Variety via Zoom about that shocking final sequence, the revelation of Max’s innocence and what lies ahead for all the Bowdens, including the daughter who may very well be the product of Anna and Max’s years-ago coupling when they were lawyer and client.
I was genuinely struck by the final scene of the series, in which the family is speaking in a sort of coded language that they understand implicitly — and we see just how haunted Anna is. Will the family always be haunted, do you think?
The Bowden family will always be haunted by Max Cady and the memory of what happened during this story. The 1991 movie has always struck me in terms of its ending narration, where Juliette’s [Lewis’ character] goes, “And then we never spoke of it again,” basically. You’re just like, Yeah, but I bet you thought about it — still thinking about it today. I wanted our version of that energy. That moment when Tom looks over his shoulder — there’s no sound in the mix motivating that. They’re just going to be looking; they’re going to be hearing things.
Lily Collias in ‘Cape Fear.’ (Apple TV)
Before Natalie joins the family, she’s fiddling with an envelope from a DNA-testing service that she hasn’t opened yet. One wonders, will she ever open it?
One does wonder that. She’s also — very intentionally, it’s barely seen, there’s no close-up of it — wearing an ankle bracelet, too. They’re all going to be dealing with the aftermath of stuff that’s gone on, and they’re probably going to have to sell that house, because I don’t know that they’re going to be allowed to practice law in Georgia in the immediate future. I always imagined that coda — that they would be trying to recreate the first scene, where they’re by their pool and having a barbecue, and things are safe and good.
The fact that the series ends with Natalie’s parentage still unresolved feels like a real conversation-starter. Do you have in your mind an answer to the question of who Natalie’s father is?
Yes, I do.
And you wrote with that in mind.
Yes.
As a viewer I could go either way!
I’m glad.
It’s interesting that the finale takes place in the Bowden family home, as opposed to, as in the films, on the boat. In a way, Cady’s intrusion into the home feels even more charged.
A lot of people asked as we were getting the last scripts in, or even before, “Is the climax of the show going to be a fight on the storm in the houseboat?” I always felt that we needed to go to the houseboat. But it felt like the conclusion of this version of the Bowden story belonged in the domestic space, so we were to bring the storm to them, and put the trial in their own home. That’s what it felt like it needed to be — and that fight in the pool should feel elemental and primal. We’re in the middle of a hurricane, but it’s their home.
Amy Adams in ‘Cape Fear.’ (Apple TV)
The violence is really gnarly in the final confrontation. I think of myself as pretty strong-stomached, and I really couldn’t watch the scene where Max convinces a drugged Zack to almost bite his own tongue off.
That was one of many shots where we spent a lot of time in the editing room being like, “How many frames of this should we show? How much is too much?” That and the head-smash within the prison in Episode 2. One of the more fun experiences I’ve had in the editing room was being in the edit on that with Martin Scorsese on FaceTime with me, going over it, saying, “Yeah, roll the cut a couple frames, right before the head starts to explode.” Just calibrating, you know, to the exact frame, like how we were going to smash that skinhead’s head.
I’m curious about the decision to have the Bowden family spare Max’s life. It’s a departure from the 1991 version.
In the 1962 version, he lets him live. We were deciding between those two potential endings. In that moment, the Bowdens are clinging to a last shred of social order and moral order that they believe themselves to be part of. They don’t want to kill a man in front of their children. You could argue that, of all the terrible decisions the Bowdens make throughout this season of television, not killing Max is one of the worst decisions that they could make.
From a sheerly pragmatic point of view, they will, of course, always wonder if he’s found his way out of prison and is just around the corner!
He’s almost certainly going to prison for a long, long time; he has done a lot of verifiably bad stuff. But if somebody else made the show and I’m watching it, I’m going, “Kill him! Please!”
Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson in ‘Cape Fear.’ (Apple TV)
The previous versions depicted a Max who maybe should not have been found guilty of their crimes due to mitigating circumstances, but were not literally innocent. This Max, we realize, simply did not do the crime for which he was convicted. It flips the story on its head.
So he was wrongly convicted of this murder, but he was a really bad guy in general, and prison narrowed and sharpened that darkness within him. It’s all directed right toward the people he blames. It’s interesting that you talk about the evolution of previous Maxes. In the book, he’s not even the client. He’s just a guy Sam saw committing a crime and testified against him — that’s it. Once you get to the ‘91 version, he was his actual client. That was [screenwriter] Wesley Strick’s innovation, which I think is really brilliant. Each innovation takes the moral complexity to a different level.
Early in the episode, Anna provokes Max into choking her in public by declaring that he killed his wife and showing compromising videos of his communications with a past mistress. He’s giving a press conference, and she says just the right things to enrage him. It felt in that moment as if she had an intuitive sense of what buttons to push to get him to drop the facade of control. Can you talk about odd bond and mutual understanding they share?
They had a bond, to some degree, in the past, and she’s had to hold herself back for most of the series. Once all is lost for her — at the end of Episode 8, where all of her family is scattered to the winds and locked away, and she’s started drinking again, there is a kind of freedom in that. She goes on her adventure in Episode 9, she gets the information, and then she’s able to use that as ammunition at the beginning of Episode 10. It’s because she has nothing to lose anymore, so she’s able to let loose and press all of his buttons. Before that, she still has the veneer of civility holding her back.
Having known my share of attorneys, I also recognized in her a desire to use logic and reason to puzzle her way out of Max stalking her. It seemed to me she triumphed when she started playing according to Max’s own terms.
The Bowdens are frustrating for a while, because they want to believe that they’ve got it under control. But I think it’s the case that — like, in your own life, you don’t want to believe things are as bad as they are. Would you move right away? Would you uproot your family and get out? I don’t think you would do that instantly. It’s hard to make big moves in life, sometimes, until it’s too late.
Moving is really hard!
At the beginning of Episode 3, there’s a scene where random people come into their backyard, and Tom just goes out to talk to them. When we were writing that episode, we were thinking “What are the things that make it feel like your space is permeable? Like you’re under threat?” Around that time, I was at my house, and I walked out into my backyard, and there were some people there. It was just like the show, although I don’t have a castle in Georgia. I was like, “What are you doing here?” and we had this crazy conversation.
Later, when the police came, they were like, “Why did you just go up and talk to people who were in your yard hanging out? When that happens, call the police.” But I don’t know. You don’t necessarily think about your own life in the way you would if you were watching characters on TV. You don’t take action that way sometimes until you’re like, Oh, yeah, I guess that really was a threat.
I think among the most powerful elements of the series is that the Bowdens are slow to take action in part because they think of themselves as fundamentally good, despite some lapses in the past. Max thrusting his perspective at them forces them to consider how different they really are from Max — that’s very potent.
There’s an energy of collective guilt and “No, no, I’m a good person” that feels like part of the culture of modern-day America. That came by osmosis into the show.
Do you think the Bowdens are bad people?
I think they’re complicated people. They’re very flawed people.
This interview has been edited and condensed.