Playing Gracie Darling review – derivative occult mystery series fails to cast a spell

The Guardian

3 days ago

The title of Miranda Nation's new mystery series, Playing Gracie Darling, reminded me of Donald Crombie's 1986 adaptation of Playing Beatie Bow – another Australian production that links a young woman's name with a children's game that defies the seemingly immutable laws of the universe. Where Beatie Bow was transported from the past to modern Sydney via a chant, 'playing Gracie Darling' involves youngsters communicating with the spirit world, where Darling may have been taken after a seance performed in a creaky old shack went terribly wrong.
Because of course it does! It's a seance. In a shack. Just once I'd love to see a 'talk to the dead' scene involving Ouija boards and the like go swimmingly well, a bunch of spirit-communicators leaving the event with ear-to-ear smiles and newfound joie de vivre. But of course, the seance in this reasonably well-staged but very codified and derivative series involves the Ouija board catching on fire and the titular girl (Kristina Bogic) spitting out demonic-sounding dialogue, before disappearing from the face of the Earth in 1997.
Jumping many years ahead, we follow Gracie's former bestie Joni (Morgana O'Reilly), who attended the seance and is now a child psychologist. In the first episode (this review encompasses the first three of six – all that was made available to the media) Joni receives a phone call, informing her that another girl has gone missing from that very same shack, where a bunch of kids were playing Gracie Darling. Ah yes, the past comes back to haunt! This moment establishes the show's very genre-ified dialogue, via lines such as 'It's happening again'. Similarly tired-sounding language is sprinkled by the writers (Nation and Anya Beyersdorf) throughout the series and delivered by the poker-faced cast.
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Occult activities becoming a form of adolescent recreation thematically aligns this show with Danny and Michael Philippou's excellent horror film Talk To Me, in which teenagers pass around an embalmed severed hand and channel a cranky spirit. But the Philippou brothers did something interesting by associating occult practices with other forms of recreational risk-taking, implying that consulting spirits and taking hits from a bong are different forms of the same ancient desire: to transcend the realm of the ordinary (which is exactly what I told my mother when she caught me smoking pot as a teenager).
In Playing Gracie Darling, the occult element just feels cribbed from a cobweb-covered playbook. Likewise for the correlation between a core mystery and the troubled past of the protagonist, who, in order to fix a contemporary problem, must address something unresolved inside themselves – an oldie but a goodie. Another key player is local cop Jay (Rudi Dharmalingam, from the ABC's sublime drama Wakefield), who was also part of that seance – because small town, because narratively convenient. The supporting cast also includes Dame Harriet Walter as Joni's mum, Pattie, and Celia Pacquola as Ruth Darling, whose daughter Frankie is the latest person to disappear.
Another very familiar element in this show concerns a situation brewing in the background that affects the local community, which serves as a scaffold for the main plot. Recently, in Last Days of the Space Age, there was an ongoing workers dispute at a power plant, and in The Family Next Door, a controversial real estate property development. Here, it's some recently constructed wind turbines which are disrupting the flight paths of birds and – some citizens believe – triggering health issues in the local community.
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Atmospherically, Playing Gracie Darling is directed assuredly by Jonathan Brough (whose recent work includes Bay of Fires, Rosehaven and The End). And it is quite well acted, with a particularly strong, grounding lead performance from Morgana O'Reilly, who had a small but memorable role as a hotel employee in The White Lotus season three. But the writing in this series comes across as very self-conscious and overall the show feels fusty and antiquated.
Playing Gracie Darling is on Paramount+ now.