All Her Fault review – Sarah Snook’s terrifying thriller is an absolute joy to watch | television

toWell, I’m a mother, neurotic, and – if one of my HRT patches slips off without me noticing – I quickly become clinically paranoid. But even if that weren’t true, this latest tale of a playdate that went unimaginably wrong would have me gripped hard. All Her Fault, an adaptation of bestselling thriller author Andrea Marra’s 2021 book of the same name, brings together a number of popular television trends, interrogating the white lotus phenomenon of American middle-class affluence, the protection it offers, and the corruption it encourages, the lost child narrative, and examining the penalty women pay for motherhood. It’s rare that all of these things are kept in balance, without at least one element becoming preachy or the thriller becoming loose or preposterous, but All Her Fault manages to handle it brilliantly.

We’re thrown right into the thick of things when wealthy wealth manager Marissa Irvin (Succession’s stalwart Sarah Snook) arrives to pick up her five-year-old son Milo from a play date at the house of another mother at the school, Jenny (Dakota Fanning). But when she arrives at the supposed address, the woman opening the door isn’t Jenny, whom she’s never heard of, or Jenny’s nanny Carey (Sophia Lillis), who was in charge of the play date, or Milo. It soon becomes clear that no one has seen Milo since Carrie picked him up from school. He’s gone, his online tracker is found smashed to bits in a school parking lot, and he remains missing even after the time the ransom demand would normally be received.

Why? Over the course of the next eight very tight episodes that nevertheless do not skimp on developing emotional repercussions or driving plot, a rich cast of suspect characters arrive before us, each with a personality and backstory revealed in peeling layers. Marissa’s husband, Milo’s father, Peter (Jake Lacy, whose work in “A Family Friend” and “The White Lotus” makes him the go-to guy when you need an all-American hiding too many secrets) is first among them. Yes, he’s taking care of his younger brother Brian (Daniel Monks), who was disabled in a childhood accident, their sister Leah (Abby Elliott as Bear) blames herself, and has years of addiction and rehab (which Peter pays for without complaint) behind her and perhaps before her to prove it. But one of the many questions that All Her Fault is concerned with is whether there is such a thing as a truly altruistic act, let alone a truly good man? But how bad would it be to have your son kidnapped?

The Irvin family’s nanny, Ana (Cartia Vergara), has taken a rare vacation at the time of Milo’s disappearance. Is this suspicious? When she returned, she denied even speaking to her fellow nanny. We have shown that this is a lie. Employers and police must accept that this is simply not believable. Marissa’s best friend and colleague Cullen (Jay Ellis) arrives to support the family. So too did Jenny, extending a hand of grief and friendship in a way that shocked their husbands and the police, but not as much as Marissa was so accepting of it. Is this suspicious? For women – for women in general, I suppose, and for men to a lesser extent – ​​it makes perfect sense.

They bond briefly at a horrific social school after being hounded for volunteer stints at the PTA by its head, perfect enemy and stay-at-home mother Sarah Larsen (Melanie Vallejo), despite the fact that they are both workers. (Sarah, whose combination of passive aggressiveness, Machiavellian talent, and sweet bitterness is more finely drawn than usual, is one of the many extra miles the creators go and a perfect example of the investment in detail that distinguishes would-be dramas from a herd of other prestige monsters.) Marissa and Jenny realize that they’re preoccupied with the anger and guilt that characterizes working motherhood (yes, yes, the rarefied kind—Ken Loach isn’t that, but he’s not trying to be) while their spouses still aren’t entirely sold on the idea of ​​raising children as a shared endeavor. So what does Jenny feel guilty about letting Carrie into their lives (it was her responsibility to find the nanny. But her husband knows he would have done a better job of checking Carrie’s references if she had been his own)? Marissa doesn’t blame her. Marissa blames herself for…everything. (Sarah also blames her, as well as the media and the public when she hears the story.) The bond that binds mothers only strengthens under pressure, and — there are dozens of additional miles traveled in the secondary story developed here — Jenny strengthens herself.

All her fault is fantastically elaborate. Every carefully planted seed bears fruit. All the narrative cogs turn and mesh quickly and smoothly. You come for the terrifying premise and stay for the sheer fun.