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The Unfinished Business of Girlhood

The "dead girl" is perhaps the most exhausted trope in modern television. She is usually a prop, a beautiful corpse washed up on a riverbank to spur a detective into action. But in *Playing Gracie Darling*, the dead girl is not just a catalyst; she is an infection. Miranda Nation’s six-part Australian drama understands that the trauma of adolescence doesn't just fade—it waits in the walls, rotting the foundation until you come back to fix it. While the series occasionally buckles under the weight of its own genre influences—echoing the survivalist angst of *Yellowjackets* and the supernatural peer pressure of *Talk to Me*—it succeeds because it treats the past not as a flashback, but as a living, breathing threat.

Director Jonathan Brough frames the Australian bush not as a sun-drenched landscape, but as a suffocating, Gothic enclosure. The visual language here is one of entrapment. Whether it’s the claustrophobic interiors of the Darling family home or the dense, tangled scrub where the central séance takes place, the camera lingers on spaces that feel haunted by what they have witnessed. The show’s central visual motif—the "game" played by modern teenagers, chanting "Gracie Darling, can we play?"—could have been a cheap jump-scare mechanic. Instead, Brough shoots these sequences with a ritualistic dread, suggesting that these children are unknowingly inviting a history they cannot comprehend to consume them.

At the fractured heart of this mystery is Joni, played with a magnetic, weary resilience by Morgana O’Reilly. O’Reilly is the show’s anchor, delivering a performance that elevates the material above its pulpier instincts. As a child psychologist, Joni is armed with the clinical language to deconstruct trauma, yet she is rendered helpless by the visceral memory of her best friend’s disappearance. The script cleverly juxtaposes her professional competence with her personal regression. Watch the scenes where she interacts with the local police sergeant, Jay (Rudi Dharmalingam); her posture shifts, her voice tightens. She is no longer the expert from the city; she is the frightened fourteen-year-old girl freezing in the corner of a shack while a séance goes wrong. This tension between the adult who wants to solve the puzzle and the child who is terrified of the answer is the series' most compelling conflict.

However, *Playing Gracie Darling* is not without its stumbling blocks. The narrative architecture struggles to balance its dual timelines, occasionally relying on heavy-handed exposition to bridge the gap between 1997 and 2025. The supernatural elements, while atmospherically effective, sometimes muddies the waters of what is otherwise a sharp critique of small-town complicity and toxic family legacies. The "ghosts" are scariest when they serve as metaphors for guilt; when they become literal plot devices, the show loses some of its psychological edge.

Ultimately, *Playing Gracie Darling* is a meditation on the dangerous allure of nostalgia. It posits that we can never truly "play" with the past without risking injury. While it may not rewrite the rules of the genre, it plays the game with a distinct, melancholy intensity. It reminds us that some secrets are not meant to be uncovered, and some games should never be played twice.