Sarah Snook’s frightened, level-voiced mother carries this eight-part kidnap mystery a good deal further than its plot deserves. It is compulsive for four episodes, competent for two more, and by the end it is explaining its coincidences to us with a straight face.
The first ten minutes are a hook of the plainest kind and they work on anyone. Marissa Irvine (Sarah Snook) drives to an address from a text message to collect her small son Milo (Duke McCloud) from a playdate. The woman who opens the door, Jenny Kaminski (Dakota Fanning), has no idea who Milo is, arranged no playdate and sent no message. We felt the floor go, and we have not had a small child in the house for years. Everything that follows across eight episodes, adapted by Megan Gallagher, Phoebe Eclair-Powell and James Smythe from Andrea Mara’s novel, is an attempt to keep that feeling alive, and for about half the run it succeeds.
Snook is the reason it succeeds for as long as it does. Marissa is a woman who has solved every previous problem with money and a list, and Snook plays the discovery that neither will work here as a slow leak rather than a collapse. She keeps answering the phone as if this call will be the one. When the break comes it is small and it is late, and by then we were watching her every second waiting for it. After Succession it would have been easy to play another sharp rich woman; this is softer and more frightened work, and the series leans on it in nearly every scene.
Jake Lacy’s Peter is the other performance people will talk about, and they will not be kind about the character. Peter takes charge of the wrong things, corrects his wife in front of detectives and treats the investigation as something being done to him. Lacy did a version of this in The White Lotus (2021); here there is a child missing and it is much harder to watch. Fanning makes Jenny, the mother at the wrong door, into the series’ most surprising presence, and the friendship that grows between the two women is the best thing the writers have added to the genre. Sophia Lillis, as the nanny Carrie Finch, is seen mostly in pieces and given more sympathy than shows of this kind usually spare for the help. Michael Peña’s Detective Alcaras is tired and decent and the only person in the house not performing.
Minkie Spiro and Kate Dennis direct, and they shoot the Irvines’ house as a place with a great deal of glass between people who are meant to be talking to each other. Gypsy Taylor dresses Marissa in soft, pale, expensive things, the wardrobe of a woman who has never had to worry about a stain, and it says what the kidnap has taken from her before she does. Jeff Beal’s score is low and patient for the first few episodes and is at its best when it stops. Later it starts underlining reveals that did not need the help.
The trouble is the plotting, and it is the kind of trouble that grows. For four episodes the mystery tightens. Then the series starts to rely on people who turn out to have known each other all along, on phones that ring at the right moment, and on a past that connects to the present with a neatness real life does not manage. The second half takes several turns we will not describe. We will say that the third of them made us laugh out loud, and the show was not joking. We were gripped, then we were patient, then, somewhere in episode six, we caught ourselves counting how many were left and were cross about it, because the acting had earned better.
The title is the argument. Whose fault is it when a child vanishes, and why does the answer so reliably land on the mother? The series has a real case to make about that and makes it best in small things: who gets asked where they were, who gets asked how they feel. It also has characters say it out loud, more than once, and every time it does the case gets weaker. Set beside Big Little Lies (2017) and The Undoing (2020), the rich-mother mystery now has its own furniture, and this one belongs somewhere in the middle of the shelf: better acted than most, plotted worse than the best.
Watch it two episodes at a time and try not to ask questions between them. Snook will keep you in your seat for the full eight. The plot, from episode five on, is counting on that.
