Netflix’s seven-part adaptation of Trent Dalton’s acclaimed novel Boy Swallows Universe has a wonderful kind of tonal elasticity, stretching from despair to happiness in a heartbeat. Its directors Bharat Nalluri, Jocelyn Moorhouse and Kim Mordaunt expand a sprawling storyline with the kind of worldbuilding I associate more with video games and fantasy narratives, infusing scuzzy settings with a heightened, almost magical realism, a transcendental energy niggling at the show’s edges.
Like the book, Boy Swallows Universe is set in lower-class Brisbane circa 1985, a city filled with lowlifes and troublemakers who orbit the life of 13-year-old protagonist Eli (Felix Cameron and then Zac Burgess). They include his mentor, Slim (Bryan Brown), his dad, Robert (Simon Baker), his mother, Frances (Phoebe Tonkin) and her boyfriend, Lyle (Travis Fimmel) – yet another father figure. There’s also Eli’s mute older brother, Gus (Lee Tiger Halley), who communicates by writing words in the air with his finger, displayed for the audience in white powdery letters like skywriting from a tiny plane.
