Review of Gracie Darling’s Game, the Australian thriller that triumphs on Netflix

The Netflix catalog added a successful Australian proposal in the tone of a mystery thriller with touches of horror. We talk about Gracie Darling’s gamewhich positioned itself comfortably in the fourth position of most viewed content on the platform behind Stranger Things, The Beast in Me.

It’s a series of six episodes lasting around 45 minutes that, despite the (somewhat banal) plot, manages to be quite entertaining. It’s one of those series that you watch thanks to its brevity and the cliffhangers with which each episode ends, which give it an addictive character.

What about quality? It has certain narrative problems, as it constantly travels from the present to the past. It’s well resolved on a technical level, but it’s easy to get lost in the gallery of characters and the relationships that unite them.

As we said, the starting point is very familiar to us. A young woman disappears after a session that goes terribly wrong. The strong point of Gracie Darling’s game It is not original but it is sustained thanks to the charisma of its protagonist and the many twists and turns in the script derived from a rigorous dosage of information. So much so that he hides his cards until the end.

Small town, big hell

In an Australian city, in the middle of summer, it became fashionable to play “Gracie Darling”. The macabre game consists of summoning the ghost of the missing Gracie Darling, who disappeared without a trace after being possessed in a session in which several of her friends participated.

Among them was her best friend Joni who returns with her mother and two daughters 14 years later when she discovers that a young woman has disappeared again under strange circumstances.

Her purpose is to put her knowledge as a child psychologist at the service of the investigation and dismantle with the scientific method the theory of the existence of a paranormal entity called Levi who wants to be freed, but, soon after arriving, she herself experiences episodes of dissociation, lucid dreams and discovers that she and her friends have been repressing, if not hiding, information about the night Gracie disappeared.

The emergence of new evidence and the direction of the investigation will change Joni’s perspective regarding her former platonic love of youth, Jay, or the environment of the Darlig family, one of the most famous of these places for its contribution to the community. A shadow of wickedness envelops the forests and it will not be easy to understand the origin of this evil.

In addition to the main mysteries, Gracie Darling’s game explores several interesting subtopics. The first of them, the clash of religious faith or belief in the occult in contrast to science. The protagonist is always the counterweight to reason, seeking viable explanations for phenomena that seem supernatural. The series constantly flirts with the idea that there is something beyond known reality that explains the events that torment the city’s young people and reserves the right to close the circle until the last moment.

On the other hand, there is a generational clash between young people and adults, the purpose of which is to protect them even from themselves. The narrative is honest if we take into account that it does not sanctify some or demonize others, just states that adolescence is a phase of rebellion, of exploring new limits and of challenging authority, regardless of the chronological moment in which we find ourselves.. And adults make mistakes too, of course.

The series’ Achilles heel is expository clarity. Although the temporal transitions from the present to the past are elegant and try to give us clues to identify the characters, some of them, in the background, obscure the result a little by “messing up” the spectators.

Likewise, anyone who aspires to be scared will fall a little short because although there are specific scares, it’s not an atmospheric series that aims to alter anyone’s heart rate. It’s more mysterious and dramatic than scary and offers a pretty fun puzzle, without more.