In Stan’s new six-part drama, Brooke Satchwell delivers a painfully good performance as Lillian, a distraught widow whose centre of gravity – entire footing in the universe, in fact – has been thrown off by the death of her fiance.
You never doubt her anguish, nor that haunted look in her heavy-lidded eyes, pressed down by grief and the unfairness of a world that never follows a just moral rhythm, tossing her around like dust in a draft.
Satchwell skilfully draws us into moments we hope we never experience for ourselves – for instance, reading a letter from an organ transplant recipient, writing to thank her for donating the heart he needed to survive. Her very inhabited performance feels authentic even when the scripting flounders and the staging gets wobbly; she also clearly performs on a higher level than her supporting cast, and is Dear Life’s only heavy hitter.
The first episode (this review encompasses the entire series) opens with a New Year’s Eve party at a Ballarat rowing club: there’s karaoke, dancing, head banging, the getting of jiggy. Lillian’s boyfriend, Ash (Khisraw Jones-Shukoor), asks her to marry him; they embrace while fireworks pop in the sky behind them. The moment isn’t exactly cheesy but it’s certainly dancing on the lip of it. And going forward there’s quite a bit of that: this series is often on the edge of spilling over into cloyingness and implausibility. There are things to appreciate but before too long the drama feels forced and unfocused, the show’s back half in particular rather clunky and scrambled.
After that prologue the timeline jumps to a down-and-out Lillian: Ash has died and she’s hitting the bottle hard, struggling to keep her job as an actor at Sovereign Hill gold rush museum – especially after vomiting mid-performance.
Initially the screenwriters (Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope, also the creators and directors) are measured and tactful in teasing out the details of Ash’s death, painting a picture via incremental, naturalistic dialogue rather than crude exposition dumps. (Outside the hospital, for instance, a young man says: “I’m really sorry about your husband … It happened here, right?”) These exchanges provide information but also invite us to ask more questions.
Once the details have been clearly established, however, Dear Life begins to shed its subtlety as it forges a narrative path forward, which involves Lillian interacting with people who received Ash’s organs – most notably Andrew (Ben Lawson), a Barossa Valley winemaker. The series proceeds to paint a thousand reasons why anonymity is probably a good thing for organ recipients. This alone could have been an interesting focus, Lillian engaging with the various beneficiaries and dealing with the maelstrom of emotions involved.
But there are various other threads to the drama and most feel disconnected or at least a little tangential. Lillian’s best friend, Mary (Eleanor Matsuura), who works at the hospital where Ash died, is traumatised by his death but conceals her anguish for the sake of Lillian. This plotline feels a little too “everything is connected”, with Mary also the wife of Lillian’s cousin Hamish but it’s reasonably interesting.
Less effective is a thread involving Ash’s killer (Luke J Morgan), who’s depicted as an absolutely irredeemable person with no morality or compunction whatsoever. His guilt is never in question, though there is a question mark over how he’ll plead; this element would resonate better if the script more credibly explored the complex relationship between justice and grief (admittedly a difficult and thorny subject). Lillian’s trauma is thoughtfully evoked but Mary’s is another story; Matsuura’s performance is fine but some of the staging is tonally jarring, deploying the kind of heavy-handed techniques we see in thrillers and horror movies.
Other threads – which are introduced deep into the run time and probably shouldn’t be revealed here for spoiler-related reasons – again feel only tangentially related.
The feeling that the writers are groping around in the dark, struggling to find the heart of the drama, ramps up as the series progresses, peaking in the final episode – which begins in another country and for a while feels like part of an entirely different production. The one truly solidifying element, binding the show together, is Satchwell, who is hauntingly good and by far outshines the series surrounding her.
All episodes of Dear Life premiere on Stan on 1 January
