Binge-r #171: The Gloaming + Messiah
Light Touch: Ewen Leslie (Alex) and Emma Booth (Molly) in The Gloaming
THE GLOAMING
Streaming Service: Stan
Availability: All eight episodes now streaming
We’re at the familiarity breeds contempt phase of streaming television – making essentially the same shows simply reduces their impact as the deluge of new titles continues. What attracts me to a series is ambition, but that can equally mean an original concoction as it does a familiar genre being turned inside out. Stan’s Australian thriller The Gloaming opts for the latter, combining moody flourishes and procedural pungency into a wild, sometimes untethered, Tasmanian experience. “Every guilty person is their own hangman,” a killer laments early on – it’s more a whydunit than whodunit – and that sense of fallibility and fear permeates this bleak intertwining of crimes. These eight episodes are wild, even wilful, but the unexpected depths it reaches make it sing a siren’s tortured song.
An adolescent flashback that ends in the unsolved disappearance of a teenage girl sets the tone, before her 20-year-old student I.D. is found at a present day murder site, reuniting an estranged pair of police detectives, Molly McGee (Emma Booth) and Alex O’Connell (Ewen Leslie), who both have connection to the original case and little wish to work together on the new investigation. Primal groans punctuate the sound mix and Hobart’s infrastructure alternates between the chillingly modern and colonial-era menace – the spookiness here flickers with intent, providing a supernatural edge that The Gloaming readily commits to instead of merely hinting at something inexplicable.
The creator and defining voice is Victoria Madden, who previously layered sci-fi intrigue through the 2016 mystery The Kettering Incident. If that was a vision of warped, secretive small-town Tasmania, the new series opens up a Hobart experiencing a housing affordability crisis and “the MONA effect” with conspiratorial strands that involve the unsettling gaze of a local matriarch (Rena Owen) and a suspect property developer (Martin Henderson). Forced to work together, neither detective wants to help the other initially, so the narrative moves forward with unsteady, seditious intent; it’s not always clear where the story is taking you. I’ll take that in a genre which has thousands of entries already. With its manifest historic guilt and creepy iconography, this is an uninhibited success.
Holy Motors: Mehdi Dehbi (Al-Massih) in Messiah
Messiah S1 (Netflix, all 10 episodes now streaming): Skirting geopolitical reality but surprisingly good on the individual cost of belief, this Netflix thriller sits on the fine line between the ludicrous and the watchable – it teeters, but never quite falls. Beginning with a public act in war-torn Syria proclaimed as a miracle, the mysterious Al-Massih (Mehdi Dehbi) presents himself as the son of God, a holy figure who eschews rival individual faiths to offer a chance at salvation. With leading man cheekbones, the softly-spoken saviour is soon crossing borders and dividing those monitoring him, whether it’s a CIA agent (Michelle Monaghan), a Texan priest questioning his faith (John Ortiz), or a tormented Israeli operative (Tomer Sisley). Australian creator Michael Petron (Till Human Voices Wake Us) has crafted a mystery with supernatural tinges, exacerbating our current attraction/obsession with messianic political figures. The show is designed to run and run – every time you think a definitive explanation is within reach, the plot doubles back and casts new doubt on Al-Massih’s true origins. Various characters are thinly drawn except for their relationship to the enigmatic fulcrum, but there’s a screw loose, binge-worthy energy to this pulpy series.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Before the much loved series emerged, Friday Night Lights (2004, 118 minutes) was a movie that looked at high school football in an obsessed Texan town with anthropological detail and nuanced performances; most of the Jason Bourne action-thrillers are now available – yes, even the Jeremy Renner oddity – and the best remains The Bourne Supremacy (2004, 108 minutes), a bracing, bruising story about finding atonement.
New on SBS on Demand: Pierre Salvadori’s Priceless (2006, 101 minutes) is a melancholy French romantic-comedy about a gold digger (Audrey Tautou) who mistakenly alights on a luxury resort’s humble bartender (Gad Elmaleh) – it is both sweet and silly; Rosemary’s Baby (1968, 131 minutes) will be forever nightmarish, as Mia Farrow’s expectant mother begins to suspect something is not right with her husband and her pregnancy.
New on Stan: Ivan Sen’s Mystery Road (2013, 119 minutes) was one of the best Australian films of the decade just closed: a compellingly sparse outback procedural headlined by Aaron Pedersen’s police detective that is grounded in historic crimes and contemporary division; a clash between documentary realism and destructive drama set in a disintegrating Ukraine, Sergei Loznitsa’s grimly fascinating Donbass (2018, 117 minutes) reveals how reason and order collapse in parallel as the story’s corruption and chaos become overpowering.
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