So far, this four-part adaptation of Helen FitzGerald’s The Cry (listen to our podcast with Helen here) has been excellent: a psychological thriller of the highest order. What I mean by psychological thriller is that all those addictive twists and turns we so love in the genre are plentiful – no more so than THE TWIST at the end of episode two – but it’s backed up by deep characterisation, plausible behaviour and expertly played out character interaction, relationship dynamics and power shifts.
Of course, everything changed at the end of that second episode. Jo and Alistair were now conspirators who were, presumably, responsible for their son’s disappearance. What we didn’t know was what happened, why they did it, and, ultimately, whether baby Noah was alive.
We were about to find out.
The first 10 minutes or so of this penultimate episodes took us back to the moment when Jo and Alistair (and Noah) were heading to Wilde Bay from Melbourne. They had stopped for a break – Alistair to telephone his daughter Chloe to tell them what time they’d be home, and Jo to stretch her legs. When she returned to the car she noticed that Noah had stopped crying and was asleep. She noticed that he was cold to the touch. He wouldn’t wake up. He had no pulse.
Panic set in. He was gone.
This scene was extremely hard to watch, but the way it was shot – mid-distance – was impeccable. Sound editing was incredible (it’s often said that victims of extreme trauma always remember the strangest, smallest details from the moment. Here it was a repeated car door alarm that wafted in and out of earshot and bled into the images), moving images were like dreamscapes, with smoke from the bushfires swirling all around. It was a living nightmare.
It had been an accident, but Alistair was quick to find a solution: it must have been the medicine. Jo had accidentally given the baby some of her medicine by accident at the airport. She was tired and stressed from the flight. It would have been easy to have made a mistake. Jo’s motherhood skills were being called into question once again, this time in the gravest, cruellest way.
But Jo was in shock and in tears and in need of an explanation, too. It could have been her. Memories altered and began to fit Alistair’s version of events. It was her.
And this is what happened to baby Noah.
Alistair tidied things up. He buried the poor mite under a tree on his favourite beach. He concocted a story. He fought fires (the bushfires felt like a clever metaphor for their current situation). He did what he was good at. This was his day job. My initial thought was that Alistair and Jo kidnapped their baby to fit up Alexandra and remove all obstacles in getting Chloe back, but he was covering up an accident to save their skins. Or so he argued. Jo would go to prison for manslaughter, his career would be over and he would never get Chloe back again. He argued it again. Jo wanted to go to the police. He argued his points again.
And so that was their plan.
But what Alistair didn’t bargain on was the bond between mother and son, and, more to the point, a grieving mother and son. The bib that she secretly lifted from the crime scene was sacred to her, but he destroyed it, arguing that all and any kind of evidence of Noah should disappear.
He was turning into an obsessive, manipulative sociopath in front of our very eyes. Jo was furious with him, and was also being crushed by guilt – she still wanted to go to the police, tell the truth and find out what really happened to their son. She still maintained that she did not accidentally mix up the medicines at the airport.
What ensued was almost a battle royale between the two: a psychological war of mistrust and paranoia. It was expertly done and, once again, extremely plausible. How do you carry out a plan like this without feeling shame and guilt? How do you carry on being in a relationship with someone who can be so manipulative, callous and almost enjoying the process of crisis management?
Jo couldn’t.
It was tense, it was heartbreaking and the breakdown of Jo and Alistair’s relationship was, well, not thrilling exactly, but intense and coruscating. You couldn’t take your eyes off it, and, once again, Jenna Coleman’s performance was just sensational – from that stomach-flipping moment she knew something was desperately wrong with her son, to her steely-eyed anger at her husband, her range was very impressive. Of course, Coleman is playing an extremely flawed character, so this gives her the license to flutter from one extreme to the next. But the way she has been doing it has been outstanding. (Ewen Leslie, too, has flipped from caring dad (which he still is, of course) to calculated manipulator has also been praiseworthy.)
With Pete The Policeman and his team now suspecting Alistair and Jo (there was no physical evidence of Noah found at their apartment, which raised their alarm bells), it’s going to be a heck of a final episode: who will break first? Will Jo do the right thing? Will we really find out how Noah died? And what is Alistair prepared to do to not only save his plan, but save the life he has become accustomed to?
It doesn’t bear thinking about.
Paul Hirons
@Son_Of_Ray
FOR OUR EPISODE ONE REVIEW CLICK HERE
FOR OUR EPISODE TWO REVIEW CLICK HERE
FOR OUR PODCAST WITH HELEN FITZGERALD CLICK HERE
The Killing Times 