The Last Anniversary review: this mystery’s missing a plot

Content warning: This review of The Last Anniversary involves discussion of domestic violence.

After years of toiling away in advertising and marketing, Sydney-based Liane Moriarty penned what was to become her wildly successful debut novel, Three Wishes, while studying at Macquarie. Nine best-sellers for adults followed, and three for kids in The Space Brigade series. Understandably, their popularity prompted a wave of adaptations.

First to wash up on our shores was HBO’s slick spin on Big Little Lies. Transporting the action from Sydney’s Northern Beaches to the similarly sun-kissed soaring real estate of Californian enclave of Monterey, the Jean-Marc Vallée-directed mystery was adapted by Ally McBeal creator David E. Kelley. But the Australian connection wasn’t lost at sea.

In a sterling cast assembling Zoë Kravitz and Reese Witherspoon, Babygirl star Nicole Kidman delivered some of her most confronting work as Celeste, a domestic violence survivor in this how-to-get-away-with-murder whodunnit that also featured True Blood star Alexander Skarsgård as her abusive husband, Perry. Kidman was an executive producer alongside Witherspoon and fellow Australian Bruna Papandrea.

Papandrea also co-stewarded Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers, the wellness resort escape gone wrong show that isn’t The White Lotus, with Kidman both producing and starring in it again.

Slushier stuff, it spawned a second run despite initially being billed as a limited series – repeating the retcon of Big Little Lies’ inaugural season, which awkwardly won a Primetime Emmy on that one-and-done basis.

Despite Moriarty’s involvement and casting supreme being Meryl Streep as Perry’s suspicious-minded mom, the second series of Big Little Lies – now directed by gifted British filmmaker Andrea Arnold – went off the boil when it went off-book. It remains to be seen if a promised third season can course correct.

But what of the latest effort, The Last Anniversary?

Last Anniversary: septic tank drama

Coming hot on the heels of yet another Moriarty adaptation in Apples Never Fall, this one was ripe for the picking. After all, showrunner and writer Samantha Strauss is riding high off the success of her Netflix hit Apple Cider Vinegar, adapted from Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano’s staggering exposé of wellness fraudster Belle Gibson, The Woman Who Fooled the World.

Undoubtedly, she knows how to pace a gripping story spun from a book. So The Last Anniversary appears to be sunk by the source material, which I haven’t had a chance to read and probably won’t now.

Once again produced by Kidman alongside Moriarty and Papendrea, it opens strong. We witness two drenched-to-the-bone women – Connie and Rose –  battle to bring a rowboat ashore in a lashing storm. One seems to be more with it than the other, who stares blankly as she cradles a newborn babe.

ScreenHub: The Last Anniversary: Kidman confirms new series adaptation

This maelstrom is painted in grey-blue hues, recalling Jane Campion’s The Piano, suggesting we’re in for a mist-enshrouded gothic tale. What follows is way more mundane.

That baby, implausibly named Enigma Munro (Colin from Accounts actor Helen Thomson in a bizarrely wooden turn), is now a 50-year-old woman. Raised by Connie and Rose, though neither is her biological mother, she’s still living alongside the latter (Miranda Richardson) on the equally unlikely titled Scribbly Gum Island.

Watch The Last Anniversary trailer.

Apparently, the unknown fate of her birth parents is Australia’s number-one mystery, with Enigma making a living out of leading tourists around the wooded outcrop.

Only you’d never know there’s any crowd appeal from the glacially paced snoozefest that follows, somehow managing to be far-fetched without ever offering anything exciting. This despite the death of Connie (Angela Punch-McGregor) and the one-two punch of her will body-swerving the entire family.

Instead, she gives away her gorgeous home to clickbait journalist Sophie (Teresa Palmer), the ex-girlfriend of her nephew Thomas (Apple Cider Vinegar actor Xavier Samuel, who is usually much more engaging).

Now, you would think that the clan who have spun an entire cottage industry out of a reasonably feeble missing persons story would be spewing bile at Connie’s perceived betrayal and a bewildered Sophie’s incursion.

But there’s very little sense that anyone’s all that put out, with most of the family fading into the background, grumbling at mundane stuff like a leaking septic tank, with the resulting poop flood about as exciting as things get.

The Tourist star Danielle Macdonald’s cranky relo comes closest to braising actual beef, but wait an episode or two and she’ll best buds podcast-producing with Sophie after initially threatening to stick lawyers on her.

Oh, and Sophie has a medical condition that causes blushing, but it only seems to manifest when most folks might reasonably blush. She becomes best buds with a snubbed family member in Claude Scott Mitchel’s sympathetically drawn Grace.

She has just given birth and is struggling with postpartum depression, but her husband, Callum (Uli Latukefu), had a fleeting fling with none other than Sophie. Again, the fireworks suggested will be delayed.

Last Anniversary: lacing a hook

Even the actual backstory struggles to bubble up. There are teases of a blood-stained dress and a Cold War intrigue, but there’s never any sense of urgency to unravelling it. Nor does Connie’s bargain basement prophecy that Sophie will meet the man of her dreams on the island offer much in the way of romance.

Palmer, so good in The Clearing and opposite Nicholas Hoult in Warm Bodies, can’t seem to bring any spark to this damp squib of a story sluggishly directed by John Polson. As silly as Kidman vehicle The Perfect Couple with equally terrible wigs, but without its camp fantastic, much of the heavy lifting in The Last Anniversary is left to teeth-gratingly twee music from the likes of, I shit you not, The Weepies.

When we finally get word of an actual killing, the murder weapon of choice is almost comically homespun. Somehow, even the cosy cottage core of Midsummer Murders feels more high stakes than this bore. Which begs the question, why was The Last Anniversary resuscitated at all when even Moriarty herself said she had long abandoned the idea?

Most plot points amount to not very much in a show that seems shit scared of doing anything even halfway dramatic. Which is a stone-cold killer for a mystery show that was perhaps best left six feet under.

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