It feels like Big Little Lies, but Sarah Snook’s domestic thriller is so much more

All Her Fault ★★★★

The domestic thriller has become a staple of prestige television over the past decade, in no small part because 2017’s Big Little Lies provided such a compelling template: big-name ensemble cast, glamorous lifestyles, stunning real-estate porn and scenery and, above all, the satisfying revelation that beneath the perfect facades, those blissed-out have-it-alls are actually tearing each other apart.

All Her Fault, set in Chicago but shot in Melbourne, is cast very much from that mould. But while it starts out looking pretty cookie-cutter, it soon carves an identity all its own, and rather inspired at that.

Not that it’s slow to start. The moment Marissa Irvine (a superb Sarah Snook) turns up at a stranger’s door to collect her five-year-old son Milo (the extraordinary Duke McCloud) from an after-school play date in the first scene, you know things have gone horribly awry.

It’s the right address, but Milo’s not there. The woman who answers the door has never heard of him, or of the kid with whom he’s meant to be having the play date, or of the kid’s mother, or of Marissa.

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare, and it’s only the beginning.

Marissa is in finance. Her husband, Peter (Jake Lacy, from season one of The White Lotus), is a commodities trader. Their house is enormous, overlooking the water. They have a nanny. Peter’s disabled brother Brian (Daniel Monks) lives with them and works for Peter, as a day trader. His sister Lia (Abby Elliott, Carmie’s sister Sugar from The Bear) is around all the time. So is Marissa’s business partner Colin (Jay Ellis). It’s a world reeking of wealth, but any one of them could be involved in Milo’s disappearance.

There’s plenty of tension, suspicion and red herrings across the eight-episode series, as you’d expect from any thriller. But where All Her Fault – produced by the team behind Downton Abbey and The Day of the Jackal – really excels is in the way it makes the domestic reflective of the social.

Privilege and disadvantage, care and exploitation, power and corruption, us and them, foreigners and locals, working women and stay-at-home mothers, husbands and wives and the way they share (or don’t) the domestic load: these pairings and oppositions and conflicts all inform the plot, in ways big and small, subtle and less so. And together they elevate All Her Fault well beyond the norm.

Michael Pena brings dignity, resolve and compassion to a nicely drawn role as the police detective leading the investigation while facing his own challenges as a parent of a disabled child. Dakota Fanning is good, too, as a fellow parent struggling with her own work-life-marriage balancing act, who nonetheless forges a friendship with Marissa when others prefer to blame her for what has happened.

But it’s Sarah Snook who anchors everything, and she’s marvellous. She’s in tears almost from beginning to end, but never a victim. She’s terrified, baffled, furious, resolved, and always utterly believable.

This is Snook’s show, as star and as executive producer, and as de facto host to the international cast in her adopted hometown. And she absolutely nails it.

All Her Fault streams from November 6 on Binge/Foxtel.

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