Sarah Snook has provided plenty of proof about how good an actress she is, and attention has been paid. She won an Emmy Award for her role as Shiv Roy, one of the manipulative wealthy siblings on Succession, and won a Tony Award for playing 26 different roles in her one-woman Broadway production of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
In her new Peacock TV miniseries, All Her Fault, Snook plays only one role — but right from the opening scene, it's a dramatic and challenging one, and she pulls you right in. Snook's Marissa Irvine is a wealthy wife with a 5-year-old son. We meet her, at the start of All Her Fault, running a seemingly mundane errand — picking up her son from an after-school playdate at the home of Jenny, one of the other classroom moms.
Except when Marissa arrives at the address that Jenny had texted to her, the woman who lives there isn't Jenny. Her name is Esther, and she knows nothing about a playdate, or about Marissa's son, Milo.
From there, things escalate quickly and frighteningly. Milo has an electronic tracker in his backpack, but it's been disabled. When Esther uses the correct phone number to call Jenny, who's played by Dakota Fanning, the news gets even worse. In the space of a few moments, Marissa goes from calm to justifiably panicked.
This is all before the opening credits. Megan Gallagher, who created and wrote the TV adaptation of Andrea Mara's novel, ramps the tension to a fever pitch at the very beginning, then follows the narrative in two directions at once.
Part of All Her Fault moves forward, day by day, tracking the events as the police work with the family to try to locate Milo. But an equal part of the story is told in flashback — revealing, slowly and sometimes surprisingly, the mysterious pasts of many of the characters.
There are lots of characters, and they're almost like a school of red herrings — at some point, it's fair to suspect all of them of something nefarious. The detective on the case, played by Michael Peña, has his hands full, but Peña is up to it. Whether he's interacting with suspects in an interrogation room or playing with his own young son at home, Peña radiates sensitivity and weariness, like Mark Ruffalo in Task.
The rest of the exceptional performances are turned in by women. Fanning's Jenny becomes a key character. So does Abby Elliott, from The Bear, who plays Marissa's sister-in-law. Her emotional range, and rawness, matches that of Snook — and the same can be said of Sophia Lillis, who plays a nanny who becomes increasingly central to the plot.
The drama's focus on all these women is not coincidental. Told from their characters' perspectives, their differing viewpoints and memories are crucial. So are the performances of the actresses who play them.
The title All Her Fault turns out to be relative, depending upon which "her" in the story is being blamed. Eventually, all of them are. But the women in front of, and behind, the camera in All Her Fault deserve nothing but credit. It's a thriller, and a psychological drama, that works so well mostly because of them.
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