A child – and a relationship – go missing in the plot-twisty thriller The Cry

Popular entertainment these days is chock-full of unstable women. There are unstable women at windows, unstable women on trains, unstable and potentially infanticidal women on planes.

Like love, unstable women are all around. Unstable women head police investigations (see: Marcella and pretty much every other example of Nordic noir). Unstable women frame their husbands for murder instead of simply clearing out the joint bank account and taking the dog and the keys to the SUV (Gone Girl). Unstable women lose their shit over finally getting their heart's desire (Black Swan). In film, books, TV and cross-genre vehicles such as The Cry, which started life as a novel by Aussie expat author Helen Fitzgerald, unstable women are the unreliable narrator you have when you're not having an unreliable narrator. No point ruining the mood with a clunky voice-over when you can have a character who's just one forgotten antidepressant away from the psych ward.

The Cry is a fine example of domestic noir.Credit:Lachlan Moore

Asher Keddie, finally liberated from the nervous tics of Offspring's Nina Proudman to grab the grunty role of Alex, Alistair's former partner and mother of their teenage daughter, emerges as the other potentially unstable woman of the series. She's a drinker. Even more sinisterly, a woman who likes to run. Alone. At night. Oh yes, and there's that little matter of cyber stalking.

But as the plot thickened (or as the thick plotenned, as we prefer to say in my house) last week, the final chilling scene saw Joanna sitting alone, counting 60 seconds as the camera drifted to the empty baby seat in the back of the car. Alistair and Joanna know what exactly has happened to baby Noah. It might be prescient to invoke the tagline of the novel, which has a hook that gets right into your gullet and hauls you onto land. "He's gone. And telling the truth won't bring him back …"

The fragmented narrative whips back and forth across continents and time. Joanna on trial (for what?) in Scotland. Joanna and Alistair unravelling in Australia. The jumping back and forth between Arcadian beachside Australia and the grim-walled orthodoxy of Scotland might remind you a bit of the use of blue and yellow filters in the Oscar award-winning film Traffic, only substitute "Edinburgh" for United States and "Australia" for Mexico, and "lost baby" for murderous drug cartel.

It's a fine example of domestic noir and the disruption that goes on in a relationship, even the most solid ones, when a perfectly good baby is lost. Having played the title character in Victoria for three seasons and half a dozen births, Coleman will have a grasp on how babies can send you well and truly around the bend. But then, Queen Vic had an army of palace staff to do all the heavy lifting. Once the placenta had been delivered she didn't have to see her children again until they were in their teens. Joanna doesn't have half her luck. Alistair sleeps with an eye mask and ear plugs even on the plane when baby Noah is screaming fit to carve a hole in the space-time continuum. It's easy to hate Alistair.

The narrative of The Cry whips back and forth across continents and time.Credit:Lachlan Moore

But that's the thing about Alistair's Aussieness as opposed to Joanna's clipped Britishness. He would have grown up during the Azaria Chamberlain frenzy. He knows how cruel the world can be to a woman who doesn't display the "right" emotions at a time of crisis. As he says to Joanna, "The world needs to see your pain. They want to see a good mother crushed, not a bad mother hiding."

I keep thinking about the red dress Joanna wears in the very first scene as she prepares to meet her accusers (of what?) in court. It's a form-fitting red dress in a shade that can only be described as Pantone Red 032 U. It's a garment that screams defiance against anyone who will judge her. It's agency, woven into sartorial form.

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