DUBAI: While Apple’s Australian thriller miniseries “Last Seen” deals with familiar tropes — a missing young girl; an investigator struggling with alcoholism and the breakdown of his marriage; the hidden darkness behind the friendly façade of a rural community; and more — it handles them all so well that it actually feels fresh.
Credit then, to Kris Mrksa — creator of the series, which he adapted from Ryan David Jahn’s novel “The Dispatcher,” director Christian Schwochow — who makes the landscape in turns foreboding and gorgeous, and the excellent cast.
Patrick Brammall plays Ian Ridley, the aforementioned alcoholic (now six months sober) and the father of the missing girl, Maggie (aka Mags), who disappeared 11 years ago, but whom Ian has never accepted is likely dead. Ian’s a former police officer but now works as an emergency dispatcher. When his office is notified that the body of a young girl has been found near his home, he expects the worst and rushes the scene, where he finds Bill — his former workmate and now partner of Ian’s ex-wife and Mags’ mother Debbie (Mags’ disappearance and Ian’s drinking having caused their marriage to break down) — and colleagues excavating the remains. DNA tests will take a while, he’s told.
Within a few days, on the night of a vigil organized in Mags’ memory, Ian answers an emergency call from a distraught, drunk teenage girl who tells him that she thinks her name might be Mags. He is convinced it is Maggie. But by the time he arrives at the pay phone from which the call was made, she is gone. As is Ian's recently discovered resolve to finally put the past behind him.
The show’s meaty, dynamic plot really kicks off from here, incorporating a reclusive couple — Jenna and Henry (played superbly by Maxine Peake and Brendan Cowell) — with ‘outlying’ ideological views; Ian and Debbie’s differing ways of dealing with the unimaginable loss they’ve suffered; the conundrum of where loyalties should lie — with family first, or with friends; and more.
Cowell, Peake, Brammall, and Daniel Henshall (as Henry’s brother and Ian’s friend Donald) are all exceptional, but the rest of the ensemble are great too. All give emotionally resonant performances that are utterly believable and perfectly pitched — an accurate description of “Last Seen” as a whole.
