'56 Days' on Prime Video Turns a Meet-Cute Into a Sexy, Twisty Thriller
Dove Cameron goes from Disney to danger in this series about dark romance, mystery, and revenge
Prime Video’s 56 Days arrives with a premise that immediately piques your curiosity before taking you down a rabbit hole of mysterious events. Written and executive produced by Lisa Zwerling and Karyn Usher, and starring Dove Cameron (Descendants) as Ciara Wyse, Avan Jogia (Victorious) as Oliver Kennedy, Karla Souza (How to Get Away With Murder) as Detective Lee Reardon, and Dorian Missick (Luke Cage) as Detective Karl Connolly, this eight-episode series places you at the end of the story and leaves clues for you to go back in time to solve the ultimate riddle: who’s body is in the tub?
Right away, the show gives How to Get Away With Murder—and not just because Karla Souza leads the investigation. The immediate whodunnit structure, along with constant jumps between past and present, establishes the rhythm instantly. But don’t be fooled. We’ve seen enough of this format to know that everything isn’t always as it seems. And what’s obvious is almost always hiding a layer of even darker discoveries.
The series opens with Ciara (Cameron) and Oliver (Jogia) meeting by happenstance in a supermarket, and immediately falling hard (red flag) and dangerously fast. Fifty-six days later—in present day—homicide investigators arrive at Oliver’s apartment only to find a brutal murder with an intentionally decomposed body. The question mark that haunts the entire series: is it Oliver or is it Ciara?
From the moment they meet, it is made clear to the audience that something is off. Initially, it feels like Ciara may be walking into a trap—until the perspective shifts, suggesting that Ciara may be the most dangerous of the two. As the chapters unfold, you are constantly pulled between two people who are presented as both the wolf and the sheep.
But perhaps the most unexpected storytelling tool in 56 Days isn’t the mystery, but the music. It drives every mood, conversation, and shift in tension so effectively that it begins to feel like the third character in every scene. The score becomes the pulse of danger, forcefully guiding the audience toward every secret hiding in plain sight.
And the secrets exist in every corner of every frame. If you blink, you’ll miss it.
The timeline structure of the series is not sensitive to fleeting attention spans. If you’re scrolling on your phone, you will miss the immediate chronology laid before you. The past and present are visually similar and—to the untrained ear—sound design doesn’t overtly signal timeline shifts. In a society where film and television writers are almost forced to show the plot within the first 5 minutes to capture viewer attention, this methodology can be more harmful to shows that shift timelines than those whose story unfolds in chronological order. For 56 Days, it seemed to teeter on the edge of doing almost too much.
In the present, Detectives Reardon (Souza) and Connolly (Missick) investigate this heinous crime carefully, slowly piecing together exactly what happened, and when it happened, in Oliver’s apartment. And by the end of Chapter 1, the audience is rewarded with a twist that snaps shut like a bear trap. You’re not just curious anymore, you’re committed to finding the truth.
By Chapter 6, the pieces of the puzzle begin to lock in place; secrets are exposed and the truth becomes more complex and heartbreaking than anyone could’ve expected. However, the middle episodes began to lose steam, feeling like a slow drag through the mud at times. Some of the reveals and side plots felt rushed and the connections felt like too many to keep up with. In the end, the finale lands a lot softer than the buildup alludes to, but the series—a story rooted in dark secrets, grief, greed, and revenge—ties the bow in a way that still feels complete despite its structurally chaotic and slower moments.
Final Thoughts
56 Days is based on Catherine Ryan Howard’s bestselling novel of the same name—the original plot unfolding during Dublin’s COVID-19 lockdown. The novel not only became a New York Times and Washington Post’s Best Thrillers of 2021 but it also won the Irish Book Awards Crime Novel of the Year.
But there is a large shift in the adaptation: it moves the story to present-day Boston, removing the pandemic setting completely. On the one hand, it feels like a smart move to keep the adaptation rooted in the here and now rather than turning it into a COVID-19 period piece. However, one has to wonder if the lockdown version may have heightened the psychological fear, making the finale worth its weight in suspense…
All eight episodes of 56 Days is available to stream on Prime Video.