What to stream this week: Eric Bana's Netflix thriller and five more picks

Sydney Morning Herald

a day ago

This week's picks include an American murder mystery featuring Eric Bana and Sam Neill, a much-hyped Stephen King adaptation and sturdy crime procedural from the Bosch universe.
Untamed ★★★ (Netflix)
Early on in this American murder mystery, which is set in California's vast Yosemite National Park, a veteran federal agent, Kyle Turner (Eric Bana), takes a new park ranger, Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago), out on official business via horseback. 'I haven't seen this view before,' Vasquez says as they cross a gorgeous riverside glade, to which Turner replies that most people only see the same 10 per cent of Yosemite. 'The rest of it's out there,' he sagely adds.
That's also my take on Untamed. While it's made with care and staffed with capable performances, the take on crime and punishment in this limited series too often feels like the same 10 per cent of the crime genre we've seen before. In its outline and emotional currents, the show flirts with the generic at times. That it holds together as a whodunit and eventually an examination of what protecting your family really means is credit to the show's perseverance and our willingness to follow this genre's well-worn trail.
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The first episode, in particular, is a spartan checking of boxes; beginning with a young woman plunging off the famous El Capitan granite monolith and the arrival of Turner, the park's criminal investigator. He's a scrupulous if taciturn detective and a sad drunk – he calls his remarried ex-wife Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt) at 2am, an unspoken loss haunting him. Vasquez is unperturbed by this lone ranger. 'I got a toddler at home.' she reasons. 'So I know how to deal with difficult.'
A succinct six episodes, Untamed was created by the father and daughter team of Mark L. Smith and Elle Smith. The former's credits include the recent Netflix western American Primeval and his calling card is nature's fury magnified by humanity's hunger for violence. This show is nowhere near as calamitous, but it racks up bodies, facts about Yosemite anthropology, and some particularly prickly exchanges between Turner and the soldier-turned-wildlife-control-officer Shane Maguire (Wilson Bethel). Anything predictable is nonetheless professional, but a sharper directorial eye would have helped.
Bana, who has aged exceedingly well into his silver fox era, puts emotional weight on the generic punctuation; his eyes say more than his dialogue in certain scenes. Sam Neill has even less to work with as Turner's boss and longtime friend Paul Souter, who needs the case solved as the media pack grows. By the final episodes, the story has dug down enough, with past crimes and melancholic discoveries, to give the leads more to do. It's just that Untamed requires patience to get that far.
The Institute ★★½ (Stan)
The screen rights for Stephen King's 2019 novel The Institute were sold on the day the book was released, in 2019. It's not difficult to see why. The story of a group of teenagers with telekinetic powers trapped in a monstrous institution running experiments on them was a throwback to some of the prolific author's earliest hits, which in turn had influenced the likes of Netflix's Stranger Things. This competent adaptation makes the creative circle complete.
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Overseen by King veterans – writer Benjamin Cavell (The Stand) and director Jack Bender (Mr Mercedes) – the story sets up two strands: 14-year-old prodigy Luke Ellis (Joe Freeman) is violently abducted and sent to the secretive Institute, while in the nearby Maine town of Dennison River Bend a haunted police officer, Tim Jamieson (Ben Barnes) is trying to fix his life. The latter's arc is a holding action, barely ticking over until Luke's desperation brings him to Tim's attention.
Life at the facility, with its adolescent inmates and creepy adult scientists, is bleak, but the horror in this science-fiction drama mostly feels compact and cautious. There's rarely a sense of the unhinged or genuinely otherworldly. As the uncompromising supervisor Ms Sigsby, Mary-Louise Parker is suitably unsettling, but like too much of this eight-part series, the capable never reaches the compelling.
The Cleaner (season 3) ★★★½ (BritBox)
The new season of this British comedy, where creator Greg Davies plays crime scene cleaning technician Paul 'Wicky' Wickstead, is starting to test the show's limits. In each episode, Wicky goes to a new crime scene and interacts with witnesses, officials, and survivors. It's an unlucky dip that makes Wicky look anew at his life. The writing is clever, the humour sardonic, and the reflections on lost opportunities always thoughtful, but Davies obviously wants to experiment with the format and tone. There are episodes here that start to unstitch the series.
Ballard ★★★ (Amazon Prime Video)
Adapted from the Los Angeles crime novels of Michael Connelly, the Bosch television franchise moves seamlessly into this spin-off, which follows dedicated LAPD detective Renee Ballard (Maggie Q, Designated Survivor). Shunned by colleagues for being a straight arrow, Ballard gets a Department Q -like shift into an understaffed cold case squad. With six Ballard novels to call on, the series is a sturdy procedural, complete with Bosch -friendly cameos, that is trying to very carefully grapple with institutional failings while maintaining a run-and-gun cop show momentum.
The Keepers ★ ★ ★ ★ (Netflix)
Netflix is a relentless producer of true-crime documentaries. The quality can vary greatly, but I'm not sure they've made one better than this still haunting 2017 series. Directed by Ryan White (Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter), it uses the unsolved 1969 murder of Baltimore Catholic nun Catherine Cesnik to examine corrupt institutional power and the pain of unacknowledged abuse. The show functions as a mystery, complete with cliffhangers, but at its core, it is a sombre study focused on individuals trying to advance justice. It hasn't lost a skerrick of its strength.
Snowfall (seasons 1-6) ★★★½ (Disney+)
There was a fair amount of attention for this American crime drama, which debuted in 2017 and was primarily set in Los Angeles during the crack epidemic of the early 1980s. But it's still worth a retrospective binge. With F1′ s Damson Idris as ambitious young drug dealer Franklin Saint, the show mixed The Wire 's grit with historical conspiracy theories such as the CIA aiding the crack trade to finance anti-communist rebels in Central America. The show's profile decreased behind Foxtel's pay TV wall, but now all six seasons are streaming on Disney+.