Kate Winslet is the heroine of the series “Mare of Easttown”. – HBO
A series that can hide another! Ten years after Mildred Pierce, directed by Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning Todd Haynes, Kate Winslet returns to HBO in Mare of Easttown, a miniseries broadcast in France this Monday at 9:05 p.m. on OCS. In this seven-part fiction, created by Brad Ingelsby (The Way Back) and directed by Craig Zobel (The Leftovers), the British actress plays Mare Sheehan, the police detective of a small Pennsylvania town, Easttown, who is given a murder investigation. Mare of Easttown is both a crime series that, like Twin Peaks, examines the impact of a crime in a small community and a family drama, like Sharp Object, where we autopsy the wounds of the past.
The series opens with the modest brick houses of the small working-class town of Easttown, lined up in neat rows and caressed by the azure light of a cool winter day. Mare knows everyone in town, everyone knows Mare, and everyone in town knows each other.
An intimate drama
Nicknamed “Lady Hawk” in memory of a winning shot at a basketball game 25 years ago, Mare wears a bad hair, rides an SUV, wears lumberjack shirts and vapes to think. At work, she is tormented because she has failed to resolve the case of a missing teenager. And, in town, reviews are already rife.
At home, Mare is also tormented. Her eldest son committed suicide. Divorced, her husband Frank (David Denman) is about to remarry. Mare tries somehow to raise her guardian grandson, teenage daughter Siobhan (Angourie Rice) and support Carrie (Sosie Bacon), her adrift stepdaughter.
She shares her roof with her intrusive mother, Helen (Jean Smart, splendid), who has a knack for getting on her nerves. His only distraction is Richard (Guy Pearce), a writer and teacher who has just moved to town.
A social thriller
Much of the storytelling centers around the murder of Erin McMenamin (Cailee Spaeny), a daughter mother, found dead at the end of the first episode. Is this tragedy linked to the unsolved disappearance of Katie Bailey? Is there a serial killer roaming the city? Colin Zabel (Evan Peters, seen in American Horror Story), a county inspector, is called in to help. Which is not to the taste of Mare, who usually thrives on her own in action. An initiate-outsider dynamic reminiscent of that of Olivia Colman and David Tenant in Broadchurch.
Mare of Easttown unfolds slowly, but surely, through its carefully constructed characters. This world smacks of lived experience. If her character carries all the misfortunes of the city on her shoulders, Kate Winslet carries the series at arm’s length. Present in almost every shot, Kate Winslet, immense, envelops this Mare, intrinsically human and deeply imperfect, with subtlety. In short, a criminal drama in the tradition ofHappy valley.