Furious review: Emmy Rossum’s vicious drama is a brutal reckoning with women’s buried rage, violence and power

It's Halloween, and a woman sits on the porch steps. Her face is half-hidden behind a cat mask, but enough of it shows, enough for her eyes to be seen. There's an unsettling triumph living in them, and as the scene unfolds you learn why: Behind her, in the house, a man is crawling toward the door, gasping, on the verge of death.

The woman, dressed in sequins, turns to a trick-or-treating child and promises him candy. Then she goes back inside, looks at the dying man, and finishes what she came to do.

It's tempting, watching that cold open, to see only one victim in the room: the man bleeding out on the floor. But Furious isn't interested in a tally that simple. The real question the scene plants, is who counts as a victim here, the man dying in front of us, or the woman standing over him, who became capable of this only because someone made her this way first. The show spends its runtime insisting it's the latter, or really, both at once: a man's death doesn't erase what was done to the woman who caused it, and her rage doesn't cancel out her own history as the one who was hurt first.

So begins Furious, a searing, clawing, deeply timely series about what happens when a person's identity is severed from them so violently, by a world of bloated and powerful men, that they no longer know who they are. The woman on the steps is Catherine Grace, played by a genuinely fantastic Lola Petticrew, a woman consumed by rage because rage is all she can actually remember.

Catherine is a survivor of trafficking run by men in powerful social circles, the men who wear one face in public and another in private. In public, they champion women's rights, empowerment, education. In private, they are the ones grinding a woman under their heel until her sense of self is reduced to a flat numbness. This numbness is actually a physical effect that Catherine experiences. Nothing belongs to her, as she says. "This body isn't mine," she says in a particular searing scene.

She has walked out of the fire, holding only fragments of her past. Catherine is out to obliterate those men one by one. She slips into different identities, playing a slow, meticulous game to draw predators in before burning them down. Threaded through the hunt is a second mystery: What really happened to the friend Catherine lost, whose murder only this circle of men can explain.

Catherine's story converges with that of Alice Black, an FBI agent played by Emmy Rossum, who's assigned to the case. Alice is a newly appointed FBI agent and former NYPD officer who made the switch after a series of domestic violence incidents caused by her then-boyfriend, Marshal, and in leaving, she left behind her old partner Danny, one of the only people who believed her while everyone else called her a liar trying to ruin Marshall's career. It's the premise that cuts too close to the bone: A woman with real, documented proof of abuse, disbelieved anyway, because a man's career is worth more than her account of what happened to her.

Furious delivers that rot without much need for exposition, it just sits there, in Alice's affect, in the distance men in the office keep from her, in every conversation her Danny has with her, tangled up in feelings of his own he hasn't resolved.

Furious is, at bottom, the story of women gasping for air in a man's world, not only the cocky, self-assured men who commit the worst crimes and get away with them because they always have, but also the "good" men, the ones fighting what looks like the good fight, who still don't leave a woman any room to breathe.

The show has a snarky little habit of catching mansplaining in the act, over and over, in the back-and-forth between the FBI and the police. Alice floats an idea to catch Catherine and it's waved off. Marshall, her abusive ex, whom she now has to work alongside on the case, floats a similar idea and gets a patient, respectful hearing. He's praised for it. It doesn't work, of course, it was rushed, but who's keeping score?

Even after he's caught on camera assaulting a woman, the story gets rewritten around him: He receives a commendation, and the record shows a man who was mid-pursuit of a suspect, not a man stalking and beating a woman.

There's a long-running cultural script that women are 'the emotional ones', quicker to cry, quicker to feel things, less equipped to reason past a feeling. Furious takes that script and turns it inside out: Here, women's emotion is the only honest response left to them, and the show seems to ask whether the problem was ever emotion at all, or just whose emotion society has decided is legitimate.

And that's really the thesis running under the whole show: Maybe the problem was never that women feel things, maybe the problem is that feeling things, especially anger, has always been treated as proof a woman can't be trusted. She is unreliable; too emotional, what does she know?

Alice is punished for her feelings by an entire system that decides her trauma is less credible than Marshall's reputation. Catherine is punished by men who assumed her rage would stay buried forever. Furious seems to argue that if this is what women are pushed toward when every legitimate channel is closed off, then maybe the fix was never to make women calmer, maybe it was to start believing them the first time.

Where Furious really distinguishes itself from a decade of prestige-cop dramas is in its refusal to let policing off the hook as an institution, even while giving individual cops and agents real interiority. The distrust is spoken plainly. Alden, the wheelchair-using client Catherine cares for in her day job as a home health aide, played by Steve Way, becomes a genuinely funny thorn in the side of the official investigation, despite his heartbreak.

He is blunt about the law enforcement, and makes it clear that he doesn't respect any of them. It's a small moment, but it does real work. It tells you the show isn't interested in making law enforcement look good by default, even as it takes the individual humans inside it, Alice, Danny, even Alice's boss, Nora Washington, seriously as people.

The series threads a needle here: it doesn't ask you to hate every person wearing a badge, but it also never lets the badge itself off the hook, and it keeps finding sideways ways, a blunt insult from a home-care patient, a commendation handed to an abuser, a good idea dismissed depending on who's speaking it.

Furious doesn't resolve any of this neatly, and it probably shouldn't. It's a show that lets its women be furious without apologising for it, while refusing to pretend that rage makes Catherine's violence any less reprehensible.

At the same time, it prods us to look beyond the immediate crime and at the systems, men and institutions that helped create the conditions for it. Furious asks angry questions, and gets angrier through its runtime. Sometimes it splutters as one does in their rage, maybe incoherent at points. But they drive their point across, with a shaking finger.