{"id":68213,"date":"2025-08-14T05:09:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T05:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/68213\/"},"modified":"2025-08-14T05:09:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T05:09:09","slug":"playing-gracie-darling-review-derivative-occult-mystery-series-fails-to-cast-a-spell-australian-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/68213\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing Gracie Darling review \u2013 derivative occult mystery series fails to cast a spell | Australian television"},"content":{"rendered":"

The title of Miranda Nation\u2019s new mystery series, Playing Gracie Darling, reminded me of Donald Crombie\u2019s 1986 adaptation of Playing Beatie Bow <\/a>\u2013 another Australian production that links a young woman\u2019s name with a children\u2019s game that defies the seemingly immutable laws of the universe. Where Beatie Bow was transported from the past to modern Sydney via a chant, \u201cplaying Gracie Darling\u201d involves youngsters communicating with the spirit world, where Darling may have been taken after a seance performed in a creaky old shack went terribly wrong.<\/p>\n

Because of course it does! It\u2019s a seance. In a shack. Just once I\u2019d love to see a \u201ctalk to the dead\u201d scene involving Ouija boards and the like go swimmingly well, a bunch of spirit-communicators leaving the event with ear-to-ear smiles and newfound joie de vivre. But of course, the seance in this reasonably well-staged but very codified and derivative series involves the Ouija board catching on fire and the titular girl (Kristina Bogic) spitting out demonic-sounding dialogue, before disappearing from the face of the Earth in 1997.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Jumping many years ahead, we follow Gracie\u2019s former bestie Joni (Morgana O\u2019Reilly), who attended the seance and is now a child psychologist. In the first episode (this review encompasses the first three of six \u2013 all that was made available to the media) Joni receives a phone call, informing her that another girl has gone missing from that very same shack, where a bunch of kids were playing Gracie Darling. Ah yes, the past comes back to haunt! This moment establishes the show\u2019s very genre-ified dialogue, via lines such as \u201cIt\u2019s happening again\u201d. Similarly tired-sounding language is sprinkled by the writers (Nation and Anya Beyersdorf) throughout the series and delivered by the poker-faced cast.<\/p>\n

Occult activities becoming a form of adolescent recreation thematically aligns this show with Danny and Michael Philippou\u2019s excellent horror film Talk To Me<\/a>, in which teenagers pass around an embalmed severed hand and channel a cranky spirit. But the Philippou brothers did something interesting by associating occult practices with other forms of recreational risk-taking, implying that consulting spirits and taking hits from a bong are different forms of the same ancient desire: to transcend the realm of the ordinary (which is exactly what I told my mother when she caught me smoking pot as a teenager).<\/p>\n

Rudi Dharmalingam as Jay in Playing Gracie Darling. Photograph: Ingvar Kenne\/Curio\/Sony Pictures Television<\/p>\n

In Playing Gracie Darling, the occult element just feels cribbed from a cobweb-covered playbook. Likewise for the correlation between a core mystery and the troubled past of the protagonist, who, in order to fix a contemporary problem, must address something unresolved inside themselves \u2013 an oldie but a goodie. Another key player is local cop Jay (Rudi Dharmalingam, from the ABC\u2019s sublime drama Wakefield<\/a>), who was also part of that seance \u2013 because small town, because narratively convenient. The supporting cast also includes Dame Harriet Walter as Joni\u2019s mum, Pattie, and Celia Pacquola as Ruth Darling, whose daughter Frankie is the latest person to disappear.<\/p>\n

Another very familiar element in this show concerns a situation brewing in the background that affects the local community, which serves as a scaffold for the main plot. Recently, in Last Days of the Space Age<\/a>, there was an ongoing workers dispute at a power plant, and in The Family Next Door<\/a>, a controversial real estate property development. Here, it\u2019s some recently constructed wind turbines which are disrupting the flight paths of birds and \u2013 some citizens believe \u2013 triggering health issues in the local community.<\/p>\n

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Atmospherically, Playing Gracie Darling is directed assuredly by Jonathan Brough (whose recent work includes Bay of Fires<\/a>, Rosehaven<\/a> and The End<\/a>). And it is quite well acted, with a particularly strong, grounding lead performance from Morgana O\u2019Reilly, who had a small but memorable role as a hotel employee in The White Lotus season three<\/a>. But the writing in this series comes across as very self-conscious and overall the show feels fusty and antiquated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The title of Miranda Nation\u2019s new mystery series, Playing Gracie Darling, reminded me of Donald Crombie\u2019s 1986 adaptation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68214,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,348],"class_list":["post-68213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}