This Aussie thriller's a masterclass in the slow build of eerie tension: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Apple TV's Last Seen

Last Seen (Apple TV) 

Rating:

Any psychologist is bound to spot the pattern. 

Dramas down-under have an obsession with vanished children. Every other Australian thriller seems to focus on the aftermath of a disappearance.

Perhaps the first, and certainly one of the country’s greatest movies, is Picnic At Hanging Rock, the 1975 story of an outing for pupils at a Victorian boarding school for the daughters of the Aussie super-rich. 

Not all the girls come back. . . it’s as though they simply evaporate.

Meryl Streep was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her performance as Lindy Chamberlain, in 1988’s A Cry In The Dark. 

Based on a real-life case, it charts the ordeal of a grieving mother accused of murder, after a wild dingo snatched her baby from a tent on a family camping holiday.

More recently, in 2018, Jenna Coleman was superb in The Cry, as a woman suspected of killing her baby (and then her husband) after the child disappears.

The same theme emerges endlessly. I’m beginning to imagine the first thing any Aussie parent does in the morning is rush to the nursery to count their offspring.

Last Seen taps into that fixation. It’s based on a novel by Ryan David Jahn, actually set in Texas, with a straightforward premise: a police dispatcher takes an emergency call from a girl he believes to be his daughter . . . seven years after she disappeared.

There’s nothing straightforward about the Australian version. 

The first two hour-long episodes are now streaming on Apple TV and they are a masterclass in the slow build of eerie tension – rolling seas and heavy mists, sunlight filtering through damp air, whirling carnival illuminations on a hot night, with undercurrents of violence ever present.

It isn’t until the end of the second part that missing Maggie dials triple-zero (the equivalent of 999). 

Somehow, though he last saw her when she was three, and her body has supposedly been found buried in woods, her dad, Ian, recognises her name and her voice, and goes dashing out to rescue her.

Ian is played by Patrick Brammall, star of the brilliant antipodean comedy Colin From Accounts. 

Viewers who have watched all eight episodes of the latest series will know there’s even an irreverent subplot about child abduction in that show.

Brammall specialises in rugged guys steeped in self-pity and alcohol, which makes him perfect casting for Last Seen. 

He’s an ex-detective who went to pieces when Maggie was snatched from her bed. Now, he’s divorced, depressed and fighting but failing to stay sober.

Maxine Peake has an air of witchcraft about her as the woman apparently now raising Maggie, with her husband, a janitor. 

They live in a woodland cottage straight out of a Brothers Grimm tale, with bundles of dried herbs in the kitchen, chickens in the yard . . . and security cameras blinking on every wall.

But CCTV won’t keep the bogeyman away.