![]() The Secret She Keeps made its debut on the BBC in the summer of 2020 and is based on the Michael Robotham’s 2017 best-selling novel of the same name. But, rather than being a fictional drama, the tense thriller is actually inspired by real life events. They live among us, in subterranean lairs, and they answer to no one.The second series of The Secret She Keeps starts on BBC1 on Saturday night, two years after the first one had millions of viewers on the edges of their seats. Then there were other moments – not, I should add, the fault of the creators – that made me want to throw something at the screen and curse certain people. There were occasions – particularly in the final two episodes – when particularly stressful moments led my mind to repeat the same two words again and again: Oh no, oh no, oh no. Still, it’s a thrill to see the pieces come together, in a fingers-shielding-your-face sort of way. These moments detract from the curly complexity of Sarah Walker and Jonathan Gavin’s screenplay, releasing some of its suffocating air out, like a pressure valve or a prematurely opened oven door. A horrific flashback to a terrible crime committed by a priest played by Nicholas Hope comes across particularly heavy-handed, and the behaviour of a “psychological investigator” who works for the police is quite silly. The bedrock of the show is credible, serious drama, though this is undercut from time to time by pulpy genre elements more befitting old-school Ozploitation thrillers – such as 1979’s Snapshot (in which the enemy is a Mr Whippy van) and the 1987 slasher flick Cassandra. This dichotomy challenges, in a reasonably sophisticated way, the fallacy that all women will feel the same way about pregnancy – a theme also at the core of Miranda Nation’s excellent 2018 Australian film Undertow. If Meghan’s baby was unintended, Agatha’s could not be more welcome she longs to have a child after losing a previous pregnancy at 32 weeks. The pair do have one important thing in common: they are both due to give birth around the same day. Meghan and Jack are experiencing financial and marital troubles – but from Agatha’s perspective, lonely and stocking shelves, it looks pretty sweet. It is obvious that Agatha envies Meghan, unaware that life inside her beautiful home is more complex than the view from over the fence. The narrative pivots between Meghan, who has two young children and a husband working in television, and Agatha (Laura Carmichael, from Downton Abbey), who is single and works at a local mini-supermarket. ![]() But when it comes to skeletons in the closet, the admission of an unintended child is nothing compared with the various kinds of jiggery-pokery and dangerous liaisons in store. The words are the beginning of a blogpost Meghan – a mummy blogger and social media influencer – is writing. Voiceover narration begins, telling the audience: “It’s time to let you in on a little secret, we didn’t plan to have another child.” The first episode opens moodily, with an image bathed in midnight blue depicting Meghan (Jessica De Gouw, recently in SBS’s sexting-themed drama The Hunting) and her husband Jack (Michael Dorman) lying in bed. Generally in a good, nail-biting way, rather than “get outta town, this is stretching plausibility” – though at times there is a faint element of that too. The directors, Jennifer Leacey and Catherine Millar, pull off no easy feat, pushing viewers into a psychologically tense space where walls feel like they are closing in and the actions of certain characters become maddening. ![]()
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