Kidnapping thriller ‘Suspicion’ banks on guilt before innocence

A media mogul’s son gets kidnapped from a Manhattan hotel. Surveillance footage from the hallway captures four people, disguised with masks of the British royal family, stuffing him into a trunk. Five British people, apparent strangers who happened to be staying in the hotel on the night in question, are fingered as suspects.

In “Suspicion,” which premiered Friday on Apple TV+, the five have a choice: fight or wait.

They fight.

“Regardless of if any of these characters have done this crime or not, all of them have something to hide,” Kunal Nayyar, who plays one of the suspects, told the Daily News.

“It’s about how an everyday citizen’s life can turn upside down in an instant when you put a microscope on them.”

“Suspicion” plays out in barely a week, from the moment of the kidnapping through the arrests to their global search for an explanation that will prove their innocence.

The last part, which takes them from London back to New York, proves an almost impossible task.

“How do you prove a negative?” asked Tom Rhys Harries, who plays another of the suspects.

They’re not under arrest, and U.S. and British cops, played by Noah Emmerich and Angel Coulby, tell them to stay away from each other. The kidnappers’ motive ― a scheme to force the media mogul, played by Uma Thurman, to reveal a big secret — has to be the work of a syndicate, the cops think, and they don’t want the plotters to keep plotting.

But the suspects don’t stay away from each other, hoping together they can prove their innocence.

“The dichotomous nature is that they need each other but they can’t trust each other,” Nayyar told The News.

“Everything is happening so fast that they don’t really have the ability to be so creative with their lies. Are they controlling the narrative or is the narrative controlling them?”

The more they run, the bigger it gets. Every move makes them look worse. Every defense makes them more guilty.

“When I get accused of something, I tend to tie myself in knots trying to explain,” Elizabeth Henstridge, who plays one of the five suspects, told The News. “And the more you explain, the more guilty you sound, even if you didn’t do it.”

For the investigators on both sides of the pond, chasing the suspects is not just watching them on CCTV and tracking them in the backgrounds of selfies. There are two mysteries: who kidnapped Leo and what truth the kidnappers want revealed by the mogul. The first will have facts, names, locations. The second could be anything: A hidden family, buried bodies, a second life as a bank robber. At times, Thurman’s character struggles to choose between her secret and her son.

The five suspects don’t get to choose. The second their names were splashed across the tabloids and Twitter, their lives were over.

“An accusation carries so much weight and it ricochets around the world so quickly,” the New York-born Emmerich told The News.

“We haven’t figured out how to navigate through this together as a society yet, how to restrain from rushing to judgment, how to restrain from piling on with the mob. It’s like the whole world is the Coliseum and we’re just throwing sacrifices in the middle to entertain. But these are real people with real lives that are being destroyed, oftentimes completely unjustly.”

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