Florence Pugh is phenomenal in the superbly layered new East of Eden

Nicolas Cage has nothing to do with Netflix’s new East of Eden limited series, or with any prior screen take on John Steinbeck’s tome, but his career speaks volumes about the power of adapting the 1952 novel. Once you discover how deeply Cage was affected and inspired by James Dean in the 1955 film, it’s impossible to see his distinctive acting presence as anything but chasing the intensity that earned Dean the first of his two Best Actor Oscar nominations.

In the Elia Kazan-directed feature that initially ushered Steinbeck’s tale beyond the page, Dean played Cal Trask, the black-sheep son to Adam and brother to Aron. Bringing raw vulnerability and unguarded angst, he’s a restless powder keg. Playing a lonely, yearning young man who has spent his life certain that he’ll never match anyone’s idea of goodness, let alone his father’s, Dean flings himself through the feature – both physically and emotionally.

For the seven decades since the film’s release, it has always been apt that this Cain-and-Abel story of family expectations, feuds, opposites, cycles and choices has proven so influential. Cal feels that he can’t escape Aron’s shadow, or Adam’s. Anything touching upon comparable themes since – especially about misunderstood teens trying to grasp a sense of themselves – has owed Kazan’s movie a debt.

The latest adaptation of East of Eden continues a pattern, and the same ideas grow within this sumptuously staged, shot and performed version of the Trask saga but filtered, as new interpretations always are, through today’s perspective.

As the series’ creator, co-showrunner and main screenwriter, Zoe Kazan also reckons with her own family’s story, grappling with Steinbeck’s book as her grandfather once did – and the actor-turned-Ruby Sparks and Wildlife scribe’s rendition is all the more resonant for it.

A little bit of history repeating

An artist contemplating his own kin is part of the story of how East of Eden arrived on the page too. Although the Hamiltons, the novel’s second Salinas Valley family in focus, have been afforded lesser prominence on the screen (The Dry’s Ciarán Hinds plays patriarch Samuel Hamilton here), they’re Steinbeck’s real-life ancestors. The author himself is a minor character in the book.

Perhaps that parallel is why Cal, the tome’s purest embodiment of reckoning with the legacy of blood, was placed so firmly at the centre of East of Eden as a movie, and why only the last quarter of the novel garnered its attention. Netflix’s seven-episode new iteration instead reclaims the book’s wider scope, to follow ripples that flow across three Trask generations from the end of the American Civil War to the First World War.

That means that those eager to see Australian actor Joseph Zada (Invisible Boys, We Were Liars, the upcoming Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping) take over from Dean as the tormented Cal, which he does capably via a more restrained performance, must wait until the limited series’ final chapters.

It’s a stubborn but quietly fragile Christopher Abbott (The Testament of Ann Lee) as Adam that provides the show’s throughline character, first as the also-agonised son of stern military veteran Cyrus (Tracy Letts, Rosebush Pruning) and as half-brother to the more-confident Charles (Mike Faist, Challengers).

The younger Kazan works with Lion director Garth Davis to establish the fraught Trask dynamic with Adam and Charles as boys (played by newcomer Asher Whitehead and Lord of the Flies’ Gus Turner), competing for the love that their dad doles out sparingly and with calculation.

That they, too, are sure they can never measure up – and that their relationship is tainted by the weight of feeling like disappointments, but still competing to be deemed otherwise – sets a poignant tone. There’s no doubting the narrative’s leanings towards tragedy.

Meet the new Cathy Ames

East of Eden’s opening voiceover offers a musing on human nature’s variations. ‘I believe there are monsters born in this world to human parents,’ it begins, ripped directly from Steinbeck’s prose. It also establishes Cathy Ames, who’ll later become Cathy Trask and then Kate Albey, as East of Eden’s introductory guide.

As she talks of good and evil, Florence Pugh’s words drip with foreboding but also calm. Echoing immediately is the steeliness and matter-of-factness that’s so key to the Little Women Oscar-nominee’s performance as the tale’s antiheroine, even as Cathy is first glimpsed bloodied and badly beaten, crawling towards the Trasks’ original Connecticut farm. Charles greets her with a firearm drawn. Adam rushes to whisk her to safety.

That early scene aside, the drama largely progresses from Adam’s childhood to Cal’s Californian adolescence, with Adam and Cathy’s short-lived marriage, his despair when she rankles against being a wife and mother, and her return to being a sex worker and then a madam, in-between.

Still, Zoe Kazan doesn’t stick to a strict linear retelling, helping time to feel like a flat circle as jumps backwards and sideways flesh out what makes her characters tick and why. Her approach isn’t to chase what made her grandfather’s film sear and soar, but to see Steinbeck’s sprawling melodrama anew, and add fresh layers.

The urgency of the movie is replaced by patience, capitalising upon having more running time to play with, and reflecting the air of inevitability that stalks Adam, Charles, Cathy, Cal and Aron (unless they actively decide not to let it).

Lee, Adam’s Chinese American servant, is welcomely restored as the story’s heart and soul after being excised from Elia Kazan’s picture, and an understated Hoon Lee (Your Friends and Neighbours) is tremendous in the part.

Cinematographers Stuart Dryburgh (Fallout) and Sam Chiplin (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) paint with light and darkness, shading everyone – including the story’s traditional antagonist, Cathy – with complexity.

Indeed, if there’s a way that this East of Eden speaks unflinchingly to now, it’s in the series’ plea to eschew polarised extremes and the ease of picking simplistic sides that comes with such views, and to instead confront the difficult mess that is life’s reality – and to know that no one is ever just one thing.

Watch the trailer

When a new vision sprouts from the seeds of the past

When Pugh caught the watching world’s attention in 2016’s Lady Macbeth, her debut big-screen lead role, she made herself a stunning calling card with her mesmerising character study of a young bride determined not to bend to the confines of wedlock. It is still one of her greatest performances.

As Cathy-slash-Kate, she slips back into this territory with not just confidence but also texture, her talents again formidable as she conveys a scheming desperation to break free of society’s restrictions.

For Zoe Kazan, as well as for Davis and Lady Chatterley’s Lover filmmaker Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre (he directs the series’ first four episodes, she helms the back three), East of Eden has a new face of inspiration. Where actors like Cage once worshipped Dean, future aspiring thespians should dream to follow in Pugh’s footsteps.

In the 50s, Jo Van Fleet won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her villainous take on Cathy – and while ruthlessness and bitterness unshakably remain in Pugh’s portrayal, this adaptation thoughtfully unpacks why a woman fighting to control her own life is considered a monster, and why evil deeds might be her path to achieving that control.

Impeccable casting cascades through the New Zealand-shot production, from Abbott and Faist, who both allow tenderness to dwell behind hardened, heartbroken facades, through to the array of Australians such as Zada, Bring Her Back’s Jonah Wren Phillips as the young Aron, plus Ground Up’s Josh McConville and Play Dirty’s Brad McMurray.

Viewers of another title that completed the page-to-film-to-TV journey in 2026, Cape Fear, might recognise Joe Anders as the teenage Aron. They should also spot a similar dialogue happening between this East of Eden and its movie predecessor, as Cape Fear had with its forebears and Netflix’s recent, equally excellent My Brilliant Career series undertook as well.

Whether we’re spinning stories of the past or of this very instant, we’re always processing our history to make a choice about how to tackle today – as so many troubled Trasks must, Cathy as well, and as Zoe Kazan does with another lingering and haunting version of their tale.

East of Eden premieres on Netflix on 1 October.

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