Irma Vep TV review: Alicia Vikander is mesmerising in this exercise in showbiz navel-gazing

As she showed in Ex Machina and The Danish Girl – and as the producers who cast her in the Tomb Raider reboot failed to grasp – Alicia Vikander can express a lot while doing very little. In this intriguing but initially slow eight-part exercise in showbiz navel-gazing, the Oscar-winner plays Mira, an American film star hired to front a French auteur’s remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic 1916 silent serial Les Vampires (about a criminal gang, partly led by the anagrammatical Irma Vep, rather than about undead bloodsuckers).

By taking on the role of Irma, Mira (see what they did there?) is seeking not only artistic credibility but also distance from a car-crash love life. She left her superstar male lover for her female assistant Laurie (Adria Arjona), only to see Laurie marry the man who helmed her last superhero blockbuster. Vikander plays mixed-up Mira with a quiet brittleness that is mesmerising. “You have a magnetic presence,” says her new director René Vidal (Vincent Macaigne). Well yes, she does.

On one level, Olivier Assayas’s HBO show, shot in a mix of English and French in Paris, is a workplace comedy with all the romantic complication and in-jokey industry stories of Call My Agent, but with smaller laughs, loftier narrative aims and without a climax tying up each episode. On another, it’s a testament to the tendency of culture to eat itself. As well as an homage to Feuillade, the series is an adaptation of Assayas’s own 2016 film of the same name, and nods to Charles Ludlam’s 1980s theatrical satire, the Mystery of Irma Vep.

There are endless layers of reference here. The velvet catsuit associated with the character was the prototype for clingy outfits that have simultaneously empowered and objectified action heroines ever since. At one point René tells his therapist he had formative fantasies about Diana Rigg’s jumpsuited Emma Peel in The Avengers. There’s a hint in the first episode that the outfit somehow possesses Mira, and it becomes a focus for the erotic mindgames the glossy Laurie plays with her.

Elsewhere, Mira’s co-star Edmond (Vincent Lacoste) keeps trying to write in a sex scene with his ex-girlfriend and make his own part more heroic. Another actor turns out to be a crack addict. The extras lobby for more money, the costume designer for more time, while the stars quibble about their characters’ motivation and credibility.

The show is gorgeous to look at and knowingly cool, with costume designs by Louis Vuitton’s creative director Nicolas Ghesquière, and a soundtrack by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. There’s even a retro pop hit used without irony – obligatory for high-concept TV these days – in this case German singer Nena’s 99 Luftballons, which Mira rocks out to in the second episode.

I watched ahead because, frankly, there wasn’t quite enough narrative or character development in the first episode to write about. The general sumptuousness, and Vikander’s performance, made me want to keep watching: whether that’s enough to sustain eight episodes may be another matter.

Irma Vep starts tonight on Sky