Binge-r #263: The Cry + Spreadsheet
Parental Advisory: Jenna Coleman (Joanna) and Ewen Leslie (Alistair) in The Cry
THE CRY
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All four episodes now streaming
I watch a seriously large amount of television as shows come and go at a now staggering rate. So it’s far from insignificant when I say that I still often reflect on this riveting 2018 Australian-British psychological drama about a couple trying to survive the disappearance of their baby son. I think about the quiet, staggering realisations played out on the face of Jenna Coleman, as a young mother already fearful that she is inadequate, the twist endings to the episodes that advanced not just the plot but your understanding of how people close to one another can embrace destruction, and the cold, controlling persuasiveness of Ewen Leslie, as a father whose need to be the man of the house finds terrible but plausible bounds. This might be a missing child mystery, but it ultimately unearths wider corrosive truths.
Based in Scotland, political spin doctor Alistair (Leslie) and his young school teacher fiancé, Joanna (Coleman), have to travel back to Australia with their four-month-old Noah, so Alistair can deal with the custody of his teenage daughter, Chloe (Markella Kavenagh), who lives with his former wife, Alexandra (Asher Keddie). The flight to Melbourne is a nightmare, emphasising how motherhood is a crucible some are broken on, but when Noah disappears on the subsequent coastal drive the media scrutiny and public judgment is unbearable for all. While the police investigate, the detective asking the most difficult questions – of herself, of the man who professes to love her – is Joanna, with flash forwards establishing heightened stakes. Asked by a psychiatrist how Alistair came to hold all the power, she simply replies, “I gave it to him”.
The Cry was adapted from the Helen FitzGerald novel of the same name by writer Jacquelin Perske (Love My Way) and director Glendyn Ivin (Gallipoli, The Beautiful Lie), resulting in a concise and coldly cathartic narrative. Coleman’s immersive performance captures the dislocating parameters of an unspeakable loss, and the direction centres the camera not just on Joanna, but how she perceives the simmering world around her. Netflix chipping in to pick up ABC titles is a hit and miss affair, but this is an opportunity you should grasp if you missed this limited series in 2018. The Cry is gripping but sharp to the touch. That is to say you should definitely watch if for the first time, but I’m still not prepared to watch it again.
Add It Up: Rowan (Alex Witt) and Lauren (Katherine Parkinson) in Spreadsheet
SPREADSHEET (Paramount+, all eight episodes now streaming): Spreadsheet is the irreverent first original Australian commission for Paramount+, the new kid on the streaming block. British import Katherine Parkinson (The IT Crowd) plays Lauren, a lawyer and newly divorced mother of two young children who keeps her commitment-free sex life planned on a file managed by her legal offsider, Rowan (Alex Witt). Organisation in the face of chaos is the recurring theme, with Lauren bumbling through setbacks in Kala Ellis’ raunchy paean to getting off. There’s so much sexual slapstick that lasting physical pleasure appears to be neglected as Lauren pinballs from drenched encounters to embarrassing schoolyard meetings, but Parkinson makes it work to a degree with her sotto voce explanations and panicked embarrassment. With Melbourne as the setting, the show refutes romantic cliches, while there’s a deeply plausible belief in the ability of personal technology to screw everything up. The best laugh in the first three episodes comes from the line, “Are you still logged in with my Apple I.D.?”
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Roland Emmerich’s World War II naval drama Midway (2019, 138 minutes) has contemporary digital effects alongside a plot and dialogue from the 1950s as a slew of American actors grit their teeth; written and directed by Nancy Meyers’ daughter Hallie, Home Again (2017, 97 minutes) is a Los Angeles romantic-comedy that makes the most of Reese Witherspoon as a divorced mother caught up with a trio of Hollywood newcomers.
New on SBS on Demand: Set in a Persian ghost town lodged in the Californian psyche, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014, 97 minutes) tracks a young man, (Arash Marandi) who enters the orbit of a nameless young woman (Sheila Vand) beset by both loneliness and a nocturnal hunger for blood, and their attraction explores notions of family, desire and feminine agency in a vivid B&W dreamscape.
New on Stan: Wes Craven both tantalised and terrorised his youthful audience with the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, 92 minutes), a nightmarish slasher celebration where Freddy Krueger distorts boundaries the mainstream cinema had never crossed; every few years Nicolas Cage turns his protean talents from the madcap to the minimal, and David Gordon Green’s textured independent drama Joe (2013, 118 minutes) is one of those films.
>> Missed the last BINGE-R? Click here to read about Disney+’s terrific throwback private eye series Stumptown and the Apple TV+ sci-fi drama Invasion.
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