After a string of dramas about real-life scams, I was beginning to wonder if anywhere was safe. We’ve had Inventing Anna, the story of Anna Sorokin/Delvey, who posed as a wealthy heiress among Manhattan’s elite, largely at their expense. Then there was The Dropout, about Elizabeth Holmes, currently in jail for defrauding those who invested in her bloodtesting company, which could not do the things it claimed. The Tinder Swindler concerned conman Simon Leviev/Shimon Hayut, who posed as the son of a diamond mogul and persuaded marks to “lend” him huge sums of money to save him from supposed enemies. As for Bad Vegan, you’ll have to look that up yourself – it begins with a promise to make a restaurateur’s dog immortal and beyond that I do not have time or space to explain.
The answer, thanks to Vanishing Act, appears to be no – nowhere is safe. This is the first Australian contribution to the true-scam drama genre to make it to our shores. It traces the disappearance of Melissa Caddick, a financier who vanished three days after the Australian Securities and Investment Commission raided her Sydney home. Four months later, her badly decomposed foot (confirmed by DNA testing) washed up on Bournda beach on the New South Wales coast 500km away from where she was last seen. In the meantime, it was discovered that she had been running a Ponzi scheme for over a decade, which, according to the show, took in more than A$40m (£20.5m) not just from strangers, but friends and family – including her parents – and left them all financially ruined.
In Vanishing Act, Caddick (Kate Atkinson) tells her own story, which opens with the discovery of the foot and works backwards. She owns a huge house and has a toyboy husband (I use that noun advisedly, because he seems to be there for little other than to run her errands). Angie, her best friend since childhood, is content with her life as a nurse and is settled in the same area they grew up in. She is glad her hard-earned family savings (and those of all the friends and relations she introduces to Caddick) are being invested wisely by her financially astute friend.
The real drama, in fact, lies in Angie and her fellow victims. Caddick’s telling of the story is pure froth, with superficial glamour that only briefly distracts from the fact that it is told without insight or charm and is increasingly at tonal odds with the suffering she caused. Caddick is a relentlessly unsympathetic figure – obsessed with the price of clothes and property, and always in pursuit of the next shiny bauble. There is no explanation (beyond an early infatuation with a scam artist boyfriend) of why she might be like this. There might not be a reason, of course. Some people are just born acquisitive, but you watch the three episodes in vain for a hint of how and why, for a small percentage, this can transmogrify into “criminally greedy” and allow them to defraud their nearest and dearest without a qualm.
Caddick is the quintessential unreliable narrator. Vanishing Act – which makes clear that it is a drama, not a documentary (although there is a factual companion piece) or a documentary-drama – incorporates just about every suspicion and conspiracy theory that sprang up around what was headline news in Australia for weeks in 2021.
The most likely explanation, of course, is that Caddick killed herself near her home and the foot washed up so far away due to odd ocean currents. But the show prefers the outlandish suggestions – such as, she cut off her own foot to throw the financial authorities off the trail – and introduces a blackmailing gangster, George, and his chainsaw-wielding accomplice to flesh (and splintered bone) it out.
But the resulting drama is uninvolving and the destruction of ordinary people’s lives is too real and obvious to allow much enjoyment of its flights of fancy and apparent hope that Caddick may have got away with it.
• Vanishing Act is available to view on ITVX in the UK and Stan in Australia
