Binge-r #273: Love Me + The Afterparty
Single White Female: Bojana Novakovic (Clara Mathieson) in Love Me
LOVE ME S1
Streaming Service: Binge
Availability: All six episodes now streaming
Binge’s first original Australian production is a Melbourne-set drama about the members of a family coming to grips with the emotional anguish in their lives: parents Glen and Christine Mathieson (Hugo Weaving and Christine Peirse) are struggling to stay connected two years after a serious car accident left her bedbound, doctor daughter Clara (Bojana Novakovic) has given up on dating because she can’t find “one grown-up man!”, and law student son Aaron (William Lodder) is starting to realise that being in love with a DJ, Ella (Shalom Brune-Franklin), is not going to be as easy as he imagined. These are somewhat tidy problems, and in Alison Bell’s writing they are advanced and acted upon with such scrupulous attention that you might yearn for a little havoc or simply just a weird detour.
So what makes Love Me worth it? Foremost it’s the show’s ability to capture how a family’s dynamic is never simple, that familiarity can move a discussion from the insignificant to the scathing with worrying ease. The first episode turns on Glen and Christine’s wedding anniversary dinner with their children, where the snippiness becomes sniping and divisions are coldly laid bare. The Mathieson’s (yes, excellent surname choice) are a family of paired allegiances – Glen and Clare, Christine and Aaron. Once the overt pop soundtrack from the first episode dies down, there’s an authentic everyday reality of uneasy years spent in proximity at play here. If you’ve ever been at a family event that has irrevocably gone south you’ll get a worrying sense of deja vu here.
Weaving, playing mild-mannered and the nervy peacemaker, shines in a non-blockbuster role that matches his age, but the standout is Novakovic. An actor constantly working but rarely finding the right role, whether in U.S. network crime dramas or Australian independent movies, she bring s a degree of self-sabotage and steely demand to the central figure of the romantic heroine. With Celia Pacquola as her chirpy colleague and lesbian best friend, Clara is a straight shooter who bestows her budding connection with a handsome neighbour, Peter (Bob Morley), with genuine emotional risk. It’s Glen who says, “Being scared is a silly reason not to do something”, but it’s Novakovic’s Clara who vividly illustrates it.
Party Down: Ben Schwartz (Yasper) and Sam Richardson (Aniq) in The Afterparty
THE AFTERPARTY (Apple TV+, all eight episodes now streaming): A conceptual tryst from Christopher Miller, one half of the team behind The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street, this comic murder-mystery is set at a Californian high school reunion where the celebrity graduate, actor and pop star Xavier (Dave Franco), has apparently been murdered by a former classmate. Each episode is told not only from the perspective of a different guest being interviewed by an irascible police detective, Danner (Tiffany Haddish), but it is styled as their suitable genre: Aniq (Sam Richardson) is in a romantic-comedy, Brett (Ike Barinholtz) plays a Fast & Furious dad, and Yasper (Ben Schwartz) dances through a pop musical. The cast is exceptional, with Broad City’s Ilana Glazer and John Early also on board, but the idea might be too clever for its own execution, sometimes sacrificing humour to shoehorn each style into the storytelling. It’s amusing, but it’s not surprising that the gags which shine through are supposed asides such as a memorably fictional celebrity biopic that stars Xavier and Channing Tatum.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Notable for an entertainingly over the top performance by Josh Lawson as an intemperate mercenary, Mortal Kombat (2021, 110 minutes) is the latest overly serious take on the martial arts video game; Synchronic (2020, 101 minutes), the new film from horror auteurs Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, is an idiosyncratic mystery about paramedics played by Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan caught up with a designer drug.
New on SBS on Demand: Permeated with the chaos of grunge-era creativity starting to waver, Alex Ross Perry’s uncompromising Her Smell (2018, 131 minutes) is five chapters – or songs – from the career of alternative trio Something She and their increasingly erratic frontwoman, Becky Something, who Elisabeth Moss plays with a shattering and eventually shattered disregard for those whose lives she impinges on.
New on Stan: A desert survival drama from Australian actor turned filmmaker Anthony Hayes, Gold (2022, 97 minutes) is a concise rending of physical and psychological limits with Hollywood star Zac Efron as the loner marooned with his greed; Mandy (2018, 122 minutes) was a cult film from day one, a slow-motion celebration of maximal filmmaking and unhinged artifice with Nicolas Cage facing the biker cult that kidnapped his partner.
>> Missed the last BINGE-R? Click here to catch up on Stan’s outback mystery The Tourist and Paramount+’s brutal western 1883.
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