“All Her Fault” opens with a nightmare: Marissa (Sarah Snook) arrives at a playdate to pick up her son, Milo (Duke McCloud). Only he’s not there. He’s never been there. Marissa calls the mom hosting the playdate, Jenny (Dakota Fanning), but she’s clueless. Nothing gets better from that point, and everything will keep you guessing.
Based on the novel by Andrea Mara, “All Her Fault” is an anxiety-inducing thriller with the sudden drops of a sinkhole and the venomous twists of a snake pit. From the second Milo goes missing, the first act of the eight-episode series will rile you up. It’s designed to do just that. Every mistake, every glare of blame, and suspicion is rendered in vivid detail. You’re supposed to scream at the screen, and you probably will. You’re also meant to doubt every character’s motives: Marissa and her husband Peter (Jake Lacy), the other moms, the nannies (Kartiah Vergara, Sophia Lillis), the family members (Abby Elliott, Daniel Monks), and the business partner (Jay Ellis). Everyone is draped in shadows, so we’re not sure who did what, but we’re sure they’ve all done something wrong.
Through a series of flashbacks reaching back as far as ten years, we see the threads come together, but sometimes the glimpses we’re shown obscure more than they reveal. That’s what makes the series intriguing: the cat-and-mouse game that the storytelling plays with the viewer. The script never lies, but its twists and deceptions turn the audience into unreliable narrators, and what we think we know gets eradicated from one scene to the next. Detective Alacaras (Michael Peña) is our only hope at solidity, but even his moral compass has vast areas of gray.
Here’s what we know. Parenting on any level of the class system is rough—as long as you’re actually parenting. Our central moms, Marissa and Jenny, are under pressure. Everyone, from their husbands to the other parents at their sons’ school, is judging them. They’re constantly confronted with expectations of how they’re supposed to perform working motherhood. By the time they end up drinking wine in the bathroom at a social, we’re ready to join them.
“I’m tired of being amazing. I don’t want to be amazing anymore.”
The themes in “All Her Fault” are orchestrated with precision. The first comes from the myriad ways the women in the show are blamed for any and everything. Of course, it helps that the cast has firepower. The micro-expressions, the twitches of repressed emotions—a big part of the thrills comes from the performances and the clues they drop. The second theme is friendship forged under pressure. We see this in the support Jenny gives Marissa, and it’s paralleled in the relationships between Ellis, Monks, and Elliot. One of the most maddening moments illustrates a third theme. In a flashback, Marissa can’t get baby Milo to sleep. She’s at her wits’ end and asks her husband to research ways to put the baby down for the night. He responds, “Of course, whatever you need. Just tell me what you want me to do,” and smiles. [insert scream here] If you haven’t guessed, the third theme is weaponized incompetence.
Throughout the series, we learn that disillusionment can lead to bad choices, that loneliness can be forced on someone, and that tragedy can expose the fault lines in any facade. At the end of the first episode, one of the two detectives refers to the twisty plot, saying, “You know, I honestly didn’t see this coming.” That line is repeated in Episode 8. However, the tension in each episode keeps us expecting surprises. That’s because very few of these characters seem like “good people,” but they’ve convinced themselves they are, and that they’ve only made unsavory choices because… Those “becauses” are why this series is well worth watching.
Coming to Peacock on November 6, with all episodes ready to binge, “All Her Fault” is a thriller that morphs into a procedural and back again; it’s also a portrait of how tragedy unravels a group of people when nothing can weave them together again.
Whole series screened for review. On Peacock on November 6.
