What to stream this week: Brooke Satchwell’s heartfelt donor drama, plus five more picks
SOURCE:Sydney Morning Herald|BY:Craig Mathieson
Don’t miss a local drama about grief and understanding, retro fun with Miami Vice and a South Korean survival thriller.
This week’s picks include a heartfelt Australian drama about grief and understanding, some retro fun with Miami Vice, a lurid true-crime doco and a South Korean survival thriller.
Dear Life ★★★½ (Stan*)
One of the hardest things to do with a series is to take time-old emotions and a familiar concept and renew them. Finding the unique in the universal is not easy, so all credit to Dear Life creators Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope. The married creatives dig deep into this heartfelt Australian drama about grief and understanding, and even if they occasionally overshoot the mark with some gambits, the way that the show navigates hardship and recovery has a hard edge and plausible concessions.
At the centre of it is Lillian (Brooke Satchwell), whose New Year’s Eve marriage proposal from doctor boyfriend Ash (Khisraw Jones-Shukoor) becomes a cruel memory when he dies following a horrific emergency room attack. Hungover and barely holding on, Lillian’s leaky life raft is Ash’s organ donor status. “Your gift changed my life,” reads the letter from the recipient of Ash’s heart. Lillian is compelled to seek them out, and the storytelling acknowledges this can stem from the worst of impulses.
Khisraw Jones-Shukoor as Ash and Brooke Satchwell as Lillian in Dear Life.
Ryan Johnson as Hamish and Brooke Satchwell as Lillian in Dear Life.
Butler and Hope are best known for comedies such as The Librarians and Upper Middle Bogan. And there are laughs here, albeit more wounded than wry. The duo has a knack for crafting unexpected responses to the everyday. They did it with the absurd pleasures of their schoolyard comedy Little Lunch, and here it’s a matter of making sense of the inexplicable. Lillian pinballs from one reaction to the next, and the storytelling explores the painful psychology of organ donation, both for her and the strangers Ash has saved.
Loading
The scope is expansive and sometimes brutal. There is a plotline, somewhat strained, about Ash’s killer and his prison circumstances while awaiting trial. But the ambitions are a plus when it comes to the married couple of Mary (Eleanor Matsuura) and Hamish (Ryan Johnson), Lillian’s best friend and cousin respectively. Instead of just being Lillian’s sounding board, their struggles become acute – understands those closest to you can say the harshest things – as they also fail to cope.
At one point there’s an official remediation session, but much here is about bridging divides when our instinct is self-preservation, whatever the cost. Lillian’s need to meet recipients, such as entitled vineyard owner Andrew (Ben Lawson), can be construed as stalking, donor program co-ordinator Susan (Deborah Mailman) points out. Perhaps a bitter mother-in-law and a controlling mother (Kerry Armstrong gone scorched earth) are too much, but healing is a test of endurance in Dear Life. The smallest steps forward are rightly hard earned.
**Miami Vice ★★★★ (**Amazon Prime Video)
Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski is preparing another Hollywood movie remake of this hit crime drama, which debuted in 1985 and changed the (stubbly) face of network television. The weekly cases of undercover police detectives Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson) and Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas), who passed as high-end cocaine smugglers, were a stylised mix of neo-noir lighting, pastel-hued fashion, existential friction and violent transgressions. The first few seasons, under showrunner Michael Mann, mostly hummed.
Don Johnson (left) and Philip Michael Thomas in Miami Vice. Credit: Alamy
Miami Vice pioneered the needle drop: the song placements were a signature aesthetic, starting with Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight for the two-part pilot. Unfortunately, that’s also the reason streaming has been problematic – the rights to numerous classic hits had to be retrospectively secured. One notable episode, season one’s Evan, is not available here because a deal still hasn’t been struck for an essential element, Peter Gabriel’s Biko.
Miami Vice has certainly aged in parts. Some of the plots are more frameworks for the visuals, while the percentage of bikini-clad female extras in then-seedy South Beach is extraordinarily high. But enough time has passed that the overt production design now has a baroque charm, while seemingly every second episode has a notable guest star. There’s less nostalgia than you would imagine, more starting points for modern screen culture. Kosinski has his work cut out.
Ted Maher in the documentary Murder in Monaco.
**Murder in Monaco ★★★½ (**Netflix)
The death of billionaire banker Edmond Safra, who suffocated in the panic room of his Monaco penthouse in 1999 after the building was set on fire, is a lodestone of unbelievable circumstances, mysterious participants and conspiratorial theories. Switching his focus from one possible explanation to the next, director Hodges Usry gives this feature-length documentary a menacing hum offset by some eccentric bit players afforded the Wes Anderson treatment (hello, Lady Colin Campbell). The narrative’s entertaining momentum is vivid and eventually uncertain – Usry finishes by reconsidering all he’s presented.
Prince George in The Prince.
**The Prince ★★ (**HBO Max)
American writer Gary Janetti hit a sweet spot on Instagram at the start of this decade, posting snippy commentary in the imagined voice of Prince George, the oldest son of British heir to the throne Prince William. Like too many funny bits these days, it became a fully fledged animated comedy in 2022. Belatedly released in Australia – Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip are among the Buckingham Palace characters – The Prince plays like an odd knock-off of a series Janetti has written numerous episodes for: Family Guy. But even less funny.
Simu Lui in The Copenhagen Test.
**The Copenhagen Test ★★½ (**Binge)
Between headlining Marvel’s Shang-Chi and playing a Ken in Barbie, Canadian actor Simu Liu has more than proven his versatility. Nonetheless, he can’t find that much to distinguish this science-fiction thriller, which is set in the near future and revolves around an intelligence analyst, Alexander Hale (Liu), who suspects his brain has been hacked by an adversary. With his loyalty and reality stretched to fraying point, Alexander has to use subterfuge to find the culprit, but this espionage update can’t get the detailed plot to produce much more than a dutiful narrative.
Kim Da-mi in The Great Flood.
**The Great Flood ★★★ (**Netflix)
If you’re already done with the holiday season, this South Koren survival thriller offers an end-of-the-world visual symphony as distraction. Recalling Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, the disaster movie starts in a Seoul apartment building exposed to a global flood caused by asteroid strikes on the Antarctic. Vertiginous waves roll into skyscrapers, forcing scientist and single mother Gu An-na (Kim Da-mi) to perilously climb higher to protect herself and her son. Kim Byung-woo’s film doesn’t relent, but its unexpected plot twists are not fully satisfying.
Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.
