3 months ago
20
The Family Next Door ★★★★
When Isabel (Teresa Palmer) blows into Pleasant Court, a neat suburban cul-de-sac in the beachside village of Osprey Bay, she hits like a sirocco, all hot, bothered and unsettling. She’s attractive, single, and mysterious, and soon enough tongues are wagging, suspicions aroused, hackles raised.
Everybody needs good neighbours, but the regular inhabitants of this tight-knit court are soon wondering if that’s what their short-term renter – there for two weeks to research and write an article on a town that could be the “new Byron Bay” – really is.
Teresa Palmer in The Family Next Door.Credit: ABC
Based on a novel by Sally Hepworth, who has made no secret of her admiration for the work of Liane Moriarty, The Family Next Door feels rather more grounded in the everyday than, say, Big Little Lies or Nine Perfect Strangers.
That makes it more relatable, though it perhaps also costs a little in terms of glamour. Still, it does have a very good-looking and talented cast, appealing real estate and some excellent beaches to make it all very pleasing on the eye.
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Adapted by Sarah Scheller (Strife, The Letdown) and directed by Emma Freeman (whose extensive credits include The Newsreader, Fake, Love Me, Clickbait and Offspring), the six-parter flits pleasingly from social satire to comedy to domestic thriller. The focus shifts from episode to episode, with each household in the court getting its turn in the spotlight, as Isabel’s real agenda is gradually revealed.
Bella Heathcote is the first to shine, as Ange, the tightly coiled real estate agent who lets the rental to Isabel, lives next door, and doesn’t hesitate to pop in unannounced. She’s a budding developer, originally from Sydney, who schedules sex with her husband Lucas (Bob Morley) and fusses endlessly so everything is just so.
“People here don’t like change,” she tells Isabel in an early exchange. “Selfish NIMBYs who don’t like growth.”
Nigel (Daniel Henshall) has been working on his PhD about erotic language in 20th century literature for four years. But he isn’t really writing at all – he’s too depressed for that – and there’s nothing erotic at all going on between him and his lawyer wife Fran (Ming-Zhu Hii).
Essie (Philippa Northeast) is a young mother struggling with post-natal depression and exhaustion and the shame of having to move back in with her mother. And Barbara (Catherine McClements) can’t help but rub her daughter up the wrong way, even though all she wants to do is help Essie and husband Ben (Tana Williams-Accra) get on their feet.
Lesbian vegan cafe owners Lulu (Jane Harber) and Holly (Maria Angelico) round out the inhabitants of Pleasant Court, and the hot summer days pass in a blur of drinking, gossiping, and lounging on deck chairs or sitting at a communal Christmas table while the kids run in and out of each others’ houses. It’s idyllic in its way, but beneath the veneer there lurk secrets galore. Naturally, the truth eventually explodes messily.
There’s nothing earth-shatteringly original about all of this, of course. But it feels close to home, in more ways than one. It’s funny, intriguing, occasionally surprising. And always deftly handled, with just enough of an anchor in real Aussie life to keep you hooked to the very end.
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