The title of Miranda Nation’s new mystery series, Playing Gracie Darling, reminded me of Donald Crombie’s 1986 adaptation of Playing Beatie Bow – another Australian production that links a young woman’s name with a children’s game that defies the seemingly immutable laws of the universe. Where Beatie Bow was transported from the past to modern Sydney via a chant, “playing Gracie Darling” 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.
Because of course it does! It’s a seance. In a shack. Just once I’d love to see a “talk to the dead” 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.
