The structure of SBS’s four-part drama Safe Home, which explores the lives of a handful of women connected through a family violence legal centre, is nothing if not ambitious. It mixes timelines and alternates between hard-hitting stories peppered with shocking events: there are flashforwards, flashbacks and temporally disconnected images inserted into individual scenes.
The show’s strongest solidifying element is an impressively layered lead performance from Aisha Dee, who previously projected a very impish and unsettling blend of insecurity and malice as the protagonist of the Australian horror film Sissy.
Several moments in Safe Home deploy horror-esque visual and atmospheric beats, except the true horror here stems from real life – in particular, Australia’s domestic abuse epidemic, which was the focus of Jess Hill’s recent, grimly compelling docuseries See What You Made Me Do (an adaptation of her nonfiction book of the same name).
Like Hill, Safe Home creator Anna Barnes endeavours to explore stories behind the statistics, using an arsenal of narrative and film-making techniques to bring them to life – from editing embellishments to voiceover narration and sporadic pockets of high drama.
Dee plays a new employee at the family violence legal centre: the organisation’s first communications specialist, whose job is less about marketing the service to the public than articulating its value to key stakeholders in the hope of avoiding a potential funding cut. Phoebe begins bright-eyed, believing she may have found her true calling. But her induction is a baptism by fire, challenging enough before she makes an innocent mistake and lets into the building a violent, enraged abuser (Yuchen Wang) who confronts his ex-wife. It’s an early indicator, for her and the audience, of the nerve-shredding events in store.
In addition to narratives directly related to the centre, the show visits three women from different walks of life who are all subjected to family abuse. There’s Diana (Janet Andrewartha), a mother and grandmother whose husband (Mark Mitchinson) uses financials to torment and control her; Cherry (Katlyn Wong), who moved to Australia from Hong Kong and split from her physically abusive husband; and Ry (Tegan Stimson), a vulnerable queer young woman with an alcoholic mother.
There’s a lot going on. While each thread is compelling and well-acted, the show spreads itself a little thin, balancing traditional anchoring elements (a protagonist and a central setting) with a more scattered and almost anthology-esque arrangement, giving it sharp edges and dislocated ends. Director Stevie Cruz-Martin (who previously helmed the engaging short form drama The Tailings) is very good at pressure-packed direction, creating big moments from what are, in terms of runtime, small sequences.
Diana’s story feels the most detached from the narrative, although Andrewartha is heartbreakingly effective and delivers a standout performance: you want to hold her and tell her everything’s going to be OK. Mabel Li very skilfully plays Jenny – a lawyer at the centre – who goes about her work calmly and methodically, routinely under-appreciated and underestimated. And Dee’s performance is, of course, impressive. She’s instantly likeable while conveying a sense of unrevealed depth.
![‘Mabel Li very skilfully plays Jenny – a lawyer at the centre … [who is] routinely under-appreciated and underestimated’](https://media.guim.co.uk/704955fd563664f6a30394780558934370c4db26/0_60_3900_2341/1000.jpg)
There are intermittent jumps forward to a police interview room, where Phoebe discusses a murder; the identity of the killer and the victim concealed until the final episode. Any mystery of this nature inevitably evokes a guessing game, which seems to have inspired the writers to opt for somebody unexpected – almost to go for a twist ending. These kinds of flash forwards are often used to add urgency and intrigue to ordinary narratives. Here it’s not needed: the drama is always on the edge, and already (given the shocking real-life statistics) urgent and vitally important. The bone-chilling ubiquity of family abuse should make this a topic more commonly explored in Australian drama.
The twist does, however, feed into a key message, summarised more than once in the voiceover narration: that family abuse can happen to anybody. Among Safe Home’s most salient observations is that properly addressing family abuse means confronting a system built from the ground up on sexism and oppression. When Phoebe describes the system as “broken” in the third episode, Jenny responds: “The system is not broken. The system is working exactly as it was designed to. That’s the problem.”
Safe Home starts at 8:30pm on SBS and SBS On Demand on Thursday.
In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org
