A Gripping, Paint-By-Numbers, And Unexpectedly Emotional Thriller

Irish author Andrea Mara has been writing incredibly solid thriller novels since 2017, but her first major adaptation only just arrived courtesy of “All Her Fault,” a Peacock original miniseries that marks Sarah Snook’s return to the small screen. Snook, who won an Emmy for her phenomenal turn as Siobhan “Shiv” Roy on the critically adored HBO series “Succession,” takes on a more maternal role (literally) on “All Her Fault,” which casts her as working mother Marissa Irvine (and, again, is based on Mara’s 2021 novel of the same name). When Marissa goes to pick up her son Milo (Duke McCloud) from a playdate — a playdate she assumes is with a young boy named Jacob (Tayden Jax Ryan), the only son of fellow working mom Jenny Kaminsky (Dakota Fanning) — at an unfamiliar address, she discovers an older woman who doesn’t know Jacob, Jenny, or Milo … and Milo isn’t there. 

Throughout the full eight-episode season provided to critics, we bear witness to Marissa’s understandable and profound agony as she tries to figure out where Milo is, aided by her husband Peter (Jake Lacy), his brother Brian (Daniel Monks) and sister Lia (“The Bear” standout Abby Elliott), and Marissa’s best friend and business partner Colin (Jay Ellis). What follows is, on one level, a pretty paint-by-numbers and fairly standard procedural thriller about a missing child, made juicier and more interesting when we learn that a woman known as Carrie Finch (“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” star Sophia Lillis) might be responsible for Milo’s abduction.

Ultimately, “All Her Fault” transcends the genre by smartly diverging from Mara’s book in small but vital ways, including a larger focus on the friendship between Marissa and Jenny, storylines about a detective, Jim Alcaras (Michael Peña) struggling to handle his own home life, and a deeper understanding of the dynamics between the story’s various characters. Does “All Her Fault” fall into some of the genre’s more predictable pitfalls, though? Yes, definitely.

You can probably guess, without spoilers, the general trajectory of “All Her Fault,” which is that more and more secrets are revealed as the search for Milo — and, by extension, the mysterious Carrie — intensifies. What should be said, though, is “All Her Fault” falls firmly into one of the thriller genre’s worst traps; specifically, the way the characters provide information.

Throughout the show, characters like Brian, Lia, and Colin (honestly, especially these three) lie about really benign things like their romantic lives or attempts to find new apartments during the middle of an active investigation, which just brings everything to a screeching halt every time a character has to admit that they lied about something irrelevant to the6 case. Worse still, almost none of the white lies told by these characters impact the story as it pertains to Milo. Ostensibly, this is to make those characters seem less reliable, but all it does is frustrate the viewer as people withhold totally innocuous things from each other for literally no reason. (To be totally fair, this exact same thing happens quite a lot in Andrea Mara’s book, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t feel as glaring in print.)

Still, even though you’ll probably want to smack whichever character is holding back information for a patently stupid reason, that aforementioned trajectory in “All Her Fault” is still absolutely engrossing, especially as the show gives a backstory to Sophia Lillis’ Carrie and fleshes out several supporting characters, giving them internal struggles not found in Mara’s novel. Not just that, but the ultimate conclusion is well-earned, deeply unsettling, and thought-provoking, so we can forgive the irritating way characters decide to lie about stupid stuff over and over again.

The real strength at the heart of “All Her Fault” lies in the performances from Sarah Snook and Dakota Fanning as two similar but different mothers who bond over feeling judged by their fellow moms; because they don’t stay at home with their sons, they both constantly struggle to balance professional goals with motherhood. This thesis — that being a mother often feels completely impossible in a world that demands so much from them — is a strong backbone for showrunner Megan Gallagher to focus upon, and it works. Plus, Jenny and Marissa’s friendship in the series gets room to grow and breathe, letting Snook and Fanning play against each other beautifully.

Beyond them, Jake Lacy, known for playing young “nice guys,” shines as the busy and aggrieved dad Peter, who will stop at nothing to find his son; and Michael Peña, whose character Jim Alcaras is raising a non-verbal autistic son and trying to provide the best possible life for his boy, delivers a thoughtful, lived-in performance. There’s also a push-and-pull between Peter and his brother Brian, who had an accident as a child and is now disabled; as expected, the family lore involved with the accident takes several twists and turns you’ll never see coming.

Despite the increasingly convoluted ways that characters in “All Her Fault” mete out information, the emotional core of the series is extremely strong, bolstered by Snook’s reliably excellent central performance as a mother desperate to find her beloved son. Fleshing out characters who didn’t get as much play in the novel, letting actresses like Snook and Fanning show off their considerable range, and using Andrea Mara’s thriller novel as a blueprint to create a story about the highs and lows of motherhood ends up working beautifully.

“All Her Fault” starts streaming on Peacock on November 6.