Playing Gracie Darling

The Kids Are Not Alright

Teenagers are always inventing weird little rituals to scare themselves. That's half the fun. Bloody Mary, the hand from the Philippou brothers' *Talk To Me*—anything that lets dread turn into a dare. In Jonathan Brough's six-part Australian mystery *Playing Gracie Darling*, that impulse gets wired to a twenty-seven-year-old local tragedy. The kids squeeze into a rotting shack, say a dead girl's name, and wait for the room to change. It's a terrific setup. I spent all six episodes wondering whether the show would really cash it in.



Brough absolutely knows how to build a place. He already had a feel for rural isolation in *Rosehaven*, and here he pushes deeper into the gothic. The town seems permanently damp, pinned beneath the steady thrum of new wind turbines that locals blame for every mysterious illness in sight. The cinematography has real heft: mud caked on boots, windows clouded with condensation, adult faces worn down by old grief. You can practically smell wet eucalyptus. The trouble is that atmosphere has to carry a lot of weight across six hours, especially when Miranda Nation's script keeps explaining trauma that is already written all over the screen.



Morgana O'Reilly is the thing that keeps the whole series upright. Joni, the child psychologist who survived that failed séance in 1997, is played with a tightly wound physical precision that never feels showy. If you only know O'Reilly from her brief, prickly-comic work as the overworked hotel employee in *The White Lotus*, this will be a jolt. Joni moves like someone trying not to leave footprints. Her shoulders stay rigid; even the way she clutches a coffee cup feels desperate, like it is the last solid object in the room. When another girl vanishes after the teenagers revive their game, the professional calm she has constructed for herself starts to splinter. Watching someone who studies trauma for a living while quietly drowning in her own is genuinely compelling.



An early scene in episode one pretty much sums up both the show's strengths and its weak spots. The teenagers sit in a circle, faces lit from below by their phones, whispering and then chanting, "Gracie Darling, can we play?" Brough moves the camera around them slowly, picking up every twitch of fake bravery and every flicker of real fear. The soundtrack falls away until all that's left is their ragged breathing. It's creepy. Really creepy. Then the adult plot barges in, and the script asks Joni to say things like "It's happening again" with a straight face. *The Guardian* wasn't off base when it said the series "comes across as very self-conscious and overall the show feels fusty and antiquated." I don't think it's quite that dusty, but the stock small-town murder beats do take some of the sting out of it.

Still, I couldn't shake it off entirely. A town that keeps recycling its own grief into a party trick is a nasty, memorable idea. Joni's investigation with Sergeant Jay—Rudi Dharmalingam gives him a wonderfully worn-out air—moves down fairly familiar tracks. The twists are guessable. The red herrings don't work especially hard. But O'Reilly sells every inch of Joni's unraveling, and that gives the story more feeling than its plotting has earned. Not every ghost story needs new rules. Sometimes it just needs someone who can make suffering feel frighteningly real.