Sarah Snook has provided plenty of proof about how good an actress she is, and attention has been paid. She won an Emmy Award for her role as Shiv Roy, one of the manipulative wealthy siblings on Succession, and won a Tony Award for playing 26 different roles in her one-woman Broadway production of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
In her new Peacock TV miniseries, All Her Fault, Snook plays only one role — but right from the opening scene, it’s a dramatic and challenging one, and she pulls you right in. Snook’s Marissa Irvine is a wealthy wife with a 5-year-old son. We meet her at the start of All Her Fault running a seemingly mundane errand — picking up her son from an after-school playdate at the home of Jenny, one of the other classroom moms.
Except when Marissa arrives at the address that Jenny had texted to her, the woman who lives there isn’t Jenny. Her name is Esther, and she knows nothing about a playdate, or about Marissa’s son, Milo.
From there, things escalate quickly and frighteningly. Milo has an electronic tracker in his backpack, but it’s been disabled. When Esther uses the correct phone number to call Jenny, who’s played by Dakota Fanning, the news gets even worse. In the space of a few moments, Marissa goes from calm to justifiably panicked.
This is all before the opening credits. Megan Gallagher, who created and wrote the TV adaptation of Andrea Mara’s novel, ramps the tension to a fever pitch at the very beginning, then follows the narrative in two directions at once.
