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Last Seen ★★
After the emotional cramp that was Amazon Prime Video’s The Runner, where Gal Gadot played a woman sprinting across London in a dull, drab attempt to find her kidnapped son, I was hopeful Last Seen would hit all the hallmarks of the Taken sub-genre.
There was promise; the six-part series is Apple TV’s first Australian production, and the next in their stream of new thrillers this year alone, ranging from slick (Lucky), to the overwrought (Cape Fear) and funny (Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed), but always engaging.
The premise is immediate: 11 years after his daughter Maggie went missing, triple-zero operator Ian (Colin From Accounts co-creator Patrick Brammall) receives a call on-duty and is immediately convinced it’s her.
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Stopping at nothing to find her, Ian – a former cop who lost his job and marriage in the haze of grief – is soon chasing after cars, roughing up teens for leads and casing suspects up down and through Victoria’s dense, foreboding rainforests that made an eerie backdrop in The Dry 2. Add in an ensemble filled with actors able to tap into intense, dark depths – including Daniel Henshall (Snowtown), Brendan Cowell (Plum) and Maxine Peake (Say Nothing) – and Last Seen has all the ingredients for a gripping thriller.
Strange, then, for Last Seen to continually undercut its tension with sluggish flashbacks and poorly placed left-turns just as a scenario is building. There is also, fundamentally, no mystery within the show’s six episodes, with the who and why established for the audience by the second episode. That is a carry over from its source material, US crime-novelist Ryan David Jahn’s The Dispatcher, which establishes early if Maggie is alive and, if she is, who kidnapped her. But an airport thriller is a fast, furious read, while Last Seen’s script from Kris Mrksa stretches out these non-relevations.
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That might work for some people. It certainly gives Brammall a lot to work with to establish how hollowed-out Ian is by Maggie’s disappearance, a crack often making it through to his voice.
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But if The Runner lacked any emotion, Last Seen might be overwhelmed by it. Take the pilot, which opens with the discovery of a toddler’s body that the audience knows – via the show’s well-publicised premise – cannot be Maggie’s. Of course, there’s immense pain witnessing Ian and now ex-wife Debbie (Jessica Wren) find a false resolution, with the latter hoping to lay her daughter (and grief) to rest while Ian fixates on revenge.
That the dispatch call doesn’t arrive until the end of episode two is indicative of Last Seen’s reluctance to move forward – a stasis that mirrors Ian, but isn’t particularly interesting to watch.
Last Seen is now streaming on Apple TV.
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