Why You Didn’t Like … Furies

After finishing Furies, one question lingered: what could this have been if Netflix cared about quality over quantity?

Netflix’s shovelware approach, like the Ghost of Christmas Past, has come back to haunt them. Even Scott Stuber (Netflix’s Head of Original Film) admits the early strategy was based on volume over substance. “We were growing a new studio. We’d only been doing this for a few years, and we were up against 100-year-old companies. So you have to ask yourself, ‘What is your business model?’ And for a while it was just making sure that we had enough. We needed volume.” 

In Netflix’s quest to become a century-old Hollywood competitor overnight, they forgot something crucial: legacy takes time, and it demands quality. Projects like Furies feel vapid, a casualty of quantity over craft.

It’s possible Stuber is unaware of the providence of his own company. They drove instant access and convenience, the perfect partners to an aging but high-quality industry. Without HBO or Apple’s brand identity around prestige TV, the rush for content at any price shows the emperor has no clothes. Endgaget sums it up well:

“Despite the sheer number of titles Netflix previously released, only a few had won accolades, had reached millions of hours of streaming, or had the kind of cultural impact some of the biggest blockbusters had achieved.”

Furious

Stuber had a big brain move: what if Netflix reduced the number of titles and focused on quality? This strategy shift came too late to save Furies and the legacy of a French Wickalike that could have been great. While my two years of French at school did not dredge much from the Internet on Furies’ production, we can infer a couple of things based on the disjointed narrative and Netflix’s history.

Lyna’s shift from vanilla-flavoured student to near-invincible fighter traumatises credibility. After six months in prison, she miraculously emerges with skills that would make John Wick turn around and walk away. This disconnect suggests what industry veterans call ‘script lag’. When a project is rushed, story cohesion suffers, and departments work in silos. The fight choreography is S-tier, but with no narrative grounding, Lyna’s miraculous Octagon-level expertise feels like an unexplained shortcut. Instead of a hero who grows, we’re left with a protagonist who toggles between victim and superhuman at the story’s whim.

It leaves her journey feeling unfinished. Lyna’s six-month miracle is a lazy plot device that defies both believability and good character building.

If you wanted to take a positive from this, it’s that some of the action in Furies is impressive shit. But, and everything before the ‘but’ is a lie, it’s so disconnected from the narrative they’ve built it’s impossible to suspend disbelief. Furies reminds me of productions where directors and writers add action for market appeal but don’t integrate it into the storyline. Furies might have benefited from fights designed as extensions of Lyna’s growth, reflecting her journey and limitations.

Luc Besson

A few people have compared Furies to Luc Besson’s work, which might leave Besson wondering what he’s done wrong. While there is a surface level similarity between Furies and La Femme Nikita, Furies doesn’t have the narrative depth to get you involved with protagonist Lyna in the way we do with The Professional’s Leon. Besson’s heroes transform through their struggles; Leon and Nikita grow through their stories, making their worlds feel real. Lyna is all technique, no development. She’s an action hero whose world feels built only to serve her next fight scene. 

It’s form in place of substance, and even the action can’t compensate. Furies falls short of the Besson ideal because it thinks style alone can win the day. Even in Besson’s most action-oriented movies, his characters grow and undergo meaningful transformations. In Furies, action serves as a distraction, a prestige designed to ensure you don’t look too hard at the weak character development.

This betrayal is particularly painful for the audience who invested in Lyna’s storyline under the assumption there would be real stakes and consequences. There’s a bait and switch where the cliffhanger ending undercuts the emotional journey we were promised, with an insulting twist that feels more like sequel-bait than a satisfying end. 

One of the series biggest selling points was the promise of a stylish, European take on the revenge genre. There’s a hard fail on the sophistication and cinematic nuance that ‘French chic’ suggests. There’s no French New Wave-inspired noir finesse here; it’s Netflix fluff with a Euro setting. We got a tourist postcard rather than serious homage.

There was genuine opportunity for an ending that promoted rewatchability or provided enduring cultural impact. English-speaking audiences didn’t get Frenchy chic; we got frustration. We didn’t see innovative character development; Furies stalls out, leaving us wondering why we wasted eight hours of our life to get here.

The Real Hero

While we’d love to see Lyna as the hero of Furies, it’s arguably Jeremy Nadeau’s Elie who demands our attention. Elie stands out, embodying the depth we crave in Lyna’s story. Where Lyna takes narrative shortcuts, Elie’s journey feels earned. His understated resilience makes him a far more interesting hero. If Furies had invested half as much in Lyna’s character as it did in Elie’s sincerity, it might have created an unforgettable protagonist rather than an empty shell casing.

This mismatch between what we were expecting and what we got is jarring. See, Lyna is cast as a one-woman army in pursuit of justice, but her one-woman is simply one-dimensional. Elie is one of the few characters with genuine nuance, likability, and unexpected appeal. Few characters in Furies get to become a hero like Elie. It’s his strength to take the hits that Lyna’s character gives that make us want to be on his team.

While Lina El Arabi carries the role of Lyna, Marina Fois as Furie is … less inspirational. There’s nothing particularly likeable about her, and I don’t mean her personality. Aside from some mad kung-fu skills, she seems frequently blindsided, while being borderline abusive to her team. Which begs the question of how she inspires loyalty, or the patronage of the underworld. This isn’t an acting problem but a script one. See, Marina Fois’ character creates confusion and frustration. A leader in the underworld should display ruthlessness, but also charisma and strategic prowess. These are missing in action here. Loyalty is unexplained rather than earned, which creates a script problem where relationships don’t feel believable or compelling.

So, What?

We suffered through eight episodes of Furies for the end credits to roll, leaving us with an overwhelming sense of ennui. Instead of the stylish, French-chic revenge saga Netflix promised, we got another shovelware series to fill the queue. With its unresolved cliffhangers and one-note characters, Furies highlights the failings in Netflix’s previous more-is-better approach: it leaves audiences with forgettable stories, unearned endings, and a longing for something lasting.

Furies doesn’t add cachet to Netflix’s brand; the one-note characters echo some of Netflix’s most forgettable projects. It reminds me of Amazon’s Citadel, which also tried to hide flaccid storytelling with spectacle.

It’s this sense of wasted time that’s my lasting memory of Furies. We expected a payoff but got a series of narrative placeholders. There’s real emotional letdown from a story that fails to provide meaningful closure. Rather than an action-fuelled trip to Paris, we got a few unbelievable set pieces bundled with a supersize set of character frustration. Furies could have capitalised on style, narrative coherence, and authentic character growth, but ultimately settled for shallow appeal that doesn’t last out the week in your memory.

Furies fails to understand that more is not better; better is better. It’s what happens when accolades, cultural impact, and cachet take a backseat to production quotas. Projects lack the memorable characters and powerful arcs that make audiences return, and perhaps more importantly, renew their Netflix membership.