‘East Of Eden’ Netflix Review: Florence Pugh Gives Steinbeck’s Great Villain Psychological Depth In Zoe Kazan’s Ambitious Limited Series

Anyone who knows East of Eden only through Elia Kazan’s 1955 film probably knows just a small slice of John Steinbeck’s novel. That movie, which made James Dean a legend, adapted only the final stretch of an epic, multigenerational saga spanning half a century. In the series Zoe Kazan has built, as both inheritance and homage to her grandfather, everything the film covers takes up less than two of its seven episodes. Seventy years separate the two adaptations, and that generational and formal shift allows Zoe to try something different from what he did. Perhaps something more ambitious, too.

The themes, however, haven’t changed. Novel, film and series are all retellings of the biblical story of Cain and Abel, only now doubled, with two sets of brothers, and all of them deal with the fear of rejection and what that fear does to the human heart. The recurring idea of timshel, the old argument over whether the Bible says «thou shalt rule over sin» as a commandment or «thou mayest rule over sin» as a possibility, returns here and becomes the inheritance that binds several generations of Trasks and, one suspects, the Kazans as well.

The series is organized, at first, as a string of flashbacks. Through them we meet the key players of a generation (or two) before the Aron and Caleb of the film: their father, Adam (Christopher Abbott), and their uncle Charles (Mike Faist), seen as very young men, both raised harshly by their own father (Tracy Letts) and already feeling the first tension between brothers, the one destined to repeat itself. Adam is the kind, «good,» beloved son; Charles is the rejected and troubled one. That tension grows when Adam finds a badly hurt girl named Cathy (Florence Pugh) lying on the ground and decides to take her home and nurse her back to health, a decision Charles likes not one bit. The man, it seems, saw something his brother didn’t.

That suspicion is confirmed in the second episode, devoted to Cathy’s brutal upbringing and to the grudges and acts of revenge she piled up through her youth, a run of tangled, violent episodes that ended with her turning up wounded at Adam’s feet. After seeing her teenage behavior, it’s clear that Cathy is a cheat, manipulative and cruel, but it’s also, she assumes, the only way she has of making herself count in a world run by men. That Zoe Kazan’s version makes her more complex than the cruel villain of earlier versions shouldn’t be a problem. The miniseries doesn’t try to turn her into a saint or a heroine. It only tries to balance, a little, what other versions treated as something close to evil personified.

At the heart of the series is the triangle formed by Cathy, Adam and Charles. She marries Adam while secretly being more interested in his brother. And when Adam decides it’s time to leave everything behind and settle with her in Salinas, California, things only get worse. Arriving there calms nothing; it complicates everything. Cathy’s pregnancy, which will finally bring Aron and Caleb into the world, doesn’t help much, and neither does the good-hearted Lee (Hoon Lee), the Chinese assistant hired to help with the house and the boys’ upbringing, entirely manage to. Soon after the birth, everything changes. From then on, the miniseries follows two parallel lives: Cathy’s new one, and that of her husband and their two sons.

What makes Zoe Kazan’s series interesting isn’t only whether, in 2026 and on a platform like Netflix, it can recover some of the epic power of her grandfather’s film. It’s also the chance to see the whole story Steinbeck told, that bid for the Great American Novel in which the lives of several generations of one family become a struggle between Good and Evil, solidarity and individualism, tenderness and cruelty. (Two families, really, since the novel also develops the Hamiltons, who play a secondary role here, with Ciarán Hinds as Samuel, Adam’s neighbor.) That inheritance repeats itself in every generation and holds as a constant, as does the temptation to «cross over to the dark side» that the Trask family wrestles with at every turn.

Pugh is the center of attention here, playing a woman whose life runs from empowerment to cruelty, from independence to wickedness. She realized very early that she didn’t want to be «somebody’s wife» or depend on anyone, and from then on she made a string of decisions far removed from any classical notion of ethics or morality. Cathy/Kate is a terrifying creation, straight out of classic cinema and literature, part femme fatale, part melodrama villain, with a touch of horror-movie creature. Zoe Kazan finds a psychological framework that explains, though it doesn’t justify, many of her actions. For her, as for the story’s other «C»s, its other Cains, Charles and Caleb, giving in to the temptation to do wrong is an everyday matter.

While telling the story of the United States, the conquest of the West and the treatment of minorities (Lee’s character is not only respected here but expanded), and while the family gets into «modern» businesses that aren’t entirely profitable, the series exposes the dark side running alongside the American dream: the dirty dealings of power and justice and, above all, the brothels where those «respectable» public figures subjected women, often cruelly. Over its seven hours, the miniseries has especially revealing moments: the relationship between Cathy/Kate and her madam (Martha Plimpton), nearly everything tied to the perverse yet suffering Charles (Faist, of Challengers, is a great actor), and the nobility, not without severity, of Lee.

Curiously, this East of Eden loses strength when it meets up with the plot we already know from the 1955 film. By then the miniseries has to reshuffle, bringing in new characters and new actors (Aron and Caleb are first children and then young men, played by Joe Anders and Joseph Zada) and a new cycle of despair, pain and suffering that can start to feel repetitive, especially for Adam, whom Abbott plays as the most put-upon man in the story. Zada is not James Dean (thankfully, he doesn’t even try to be), but beyond that, the sense is that the series weakens as it reaches its final stretch. Not enough to invalidate everything it has achieved until then, but enough to keep it from an ending worthy of what came before. That’s when it’s worth switching platforms, finding one that has the 1955 film, and finishing the story there. Zoe, in honor of her grandfather, might even forgive the betrayal.