"Pieces of Her," which premiered Friday on Netflix and based on the 2018 Karin Slaughter novel of the same name, is a tidy and effective thriller without much to say about the state of anything at all. The ratio of violence to running time is low, which is welcome, and there is barely any sex, which is reasonable enough for a story whose characters are more worried about being killed than hooking up and whose most important relationship is that of mother and daughter. And that too is a kind of relief.
The series, developed by Charlotte Stoudt ("Homeland") and directed in its entirety by Minkie Spiro ("The Plot Against America"), keeps you moving along, even when you have to work a little to make sense of it — or when, seemingly about to end, it reveals a new set of twists and turns, like a line at Disneyland, and sets you thinking about problems of pacing in the eight-hour narrative universe.
Toni Collette plays Laura, a speech therapist in the sleepy, sandy community of Belle Isle, Georgia; Bella Heathcote is her daughter Andy, who came down from New York when Laura was undergoing cancer treatment and has stuck around, working nights as a police dispatcher and living in Laura's back house, where, she texts a friend, she can "fail rent free." (She's an artist who has reduced herself to doodling.)
