Mare of Easttown live review (series, 2021)

Mare of Easttown : Kate Winslet leads the investigation

After The Outsider and The Undoing, HBO unveils its new criminal miniseries. Consisting of seven episodes, Mare of Easttown takes place in a small town in Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. The first episode takes the time to reveal the different faces of this community, all linked in one way or another.

Among them are Mare Sheehan (Kate winslet), an inspector who has been investigating the disappearance of a young woman for several months. Characterized by the death of her son and installed opposite her ex-husband’s house with her mother with whom she has great difficulty living together, the heroine skates as much in her personal life as in the affair which plunged her neighbors into fear.

When the body of a teenage girl and mother of a baby is found in the wilderness, Mare is on the verge of breaking up. This discovery will bring out many secrets hardly kept by inhabitants who look at and judge each other despite the supposed tranquility of the village. A more hostile environment than it seems in which the police officer Colin Zabel (Evan Peters) arrives, come to lend a hand to Mare.

Gone babies gone

The frame of Mare of Easttown takes up several elements familiar to thriller lovers. OfA man came by To Fargo, Passing by Twin peaks, small towns with charming appearances, turned upside down by an arrival or a murder, have inspired many feature films and series.

Associated with disappearances, this isolated setting has given birth in recent years to works such as Prisoners Where Captives. The HBO Miniseries doesn’t really stand out of his predecessors in terms of his police intrigue and if they remain gripping, the twists and turns of the investigation are linked in an agreed manner.

Characters who eclipse the detective story

Mare of Easttown on the other hand, remains more astonishing in the way it treats its protagonists. The program is entirely written by Brad Ingelsby. This screenwriter from Pennsylvania is used to dealing with American towns since he is notably behind the scripts of The Way Back and The Infernos of Wrath, two dramas one of whose qualities was none other than the writing accuracy of the characters. With American Woman, he lingered on the fate of a woman played by Sienna Miller, upset by the disappearance of her daughter and forced to raise her grandson.

The mini-series is therefore more in line with the works of its author than that of its director Craig Zobel, director of the horror film. The Hunt. Mare of Easttown leans over dysfunctional families, on parents who fail to assume their responsibilities and on the heavy heritage that is passed down from generation to generation. The youngest people already seem resigned to the idea of ​​continuing to evolve in this environment, rather than leaving it to try to start from scratch.

In addition to the excellent Kate Winslet, Angourie Rice, Julianne Nicholson, David Denman, Jean Smart and Cailee Spaeny brilliantly embody these inhabitants who drag their pots as best they can. From the pilot, their links are perfectly developed, so much so that the newcomers embodied by Evan Peters and Guy Pearce immediately appear as strangers in the eyes of the spectator, where the others blend into the background. But in Easttown, unexpected revelations don’t necessarily come from strangers …

Mare of Easttown, available on OCS from April 19, 2021. Above the trailer. Find all our trailers here.