Andrea Harkin puts actors first, and we rate her ability to keep a family feud entertaining. Her work on The Girlfriend is good melodrama, though its performances cannot make every escalation convincing.
Fi1m perspective
In The Girlfriend (2025), a mother and her son’s girlfriend keep taking their feud seriously long after sensible people would have stopped. Andrea Harkin and fellow director Robin Wright understand why that can be entertaining. We enjoyed the performances more than the mystery, because Wright and Olivia Cooke make the women worth following even when the plot becomes predictable. The shifting viewpoints work best when the question is who has misread whom. Harkin helps make this good, enjoyably excessive television, without quite making it a convincing psychological thriller.
Harkin’s television work began with episodes of Clique (2017), before she became lead director on Come Home (2018) and The Trial of Christine Keeler (2019–2020). She continued in that role on The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2022) and the second series of Time (2023). The move from directing episodes to leading dramas is the significant turn here. These are assignments that suit her interest in intense, character-driven drama, including stories told from young or marginalised perspectives.
The Party (2016), an early short, provides a useful clue to how she works: in discussing it, Harkin described inviting actors’ ideas and instincts and trying to leave time for them to play. That approach fits what we value in The Girlfriend, where the performances remain engaging after our interest in the mystery starts to fade. Harkin directs episodes four to six, with Wright sharing the directing work across the series. We would welcome more room for the supporting characters, who remain thin beside the central women.
No amount of commitment from the actors quite solves the problem of motives that become harder to believe. As the behaviour escalates, the women lose some of the complexity that made their early hostility interesting. Harkin and Wright sustain the entertainment, but the psychological thriller needs more credible choices from its characters. Choose The Girlfriend for an evening of family melodrama, rather than a mystery to examine closely.
Biography
Andrea Harkin is a director from Northern Ireland, based in London. She trained at the National Film and Television School.
Her early television credits include directing episodes of the BBC Three series Clique (2017) and the BBC One mini-series Come Home (2018). She later directed all episodes of The Trial of Christine Keeler (2019–2020) and The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2022), as well as episodes of Soulmates (2020).
Harkin directed three episodes of the Amazon Prime Video series The Girlfriend (2025) and served as executive producer and director on series two of the BBC One series Time (2023). She is also credited as director on episodes of HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (season two).
