Created for television by Megan Gallagher – Based on the novel by Andrea Mara – Directed by Minkie Spiro and Kate Dennis – Starring Sarah Snook, Jake Lacy, Dakota Fanning, Michael Peña, Sophia Lillis, Abby Elliott, Jay Ellis, and Daniel Monks
Marissa Irvine arrives to pick up her young son from a playdate only to discover that the woman who answers the door has no idea who she is and has never heard of her son. What follows is a frantic search that begins exposing secrets within Marissa’s family and the people around them.
All Her Fault has the kind of premise that makes it very easy to hit play on the next episode. There’s always another question to answer, another secret waiting to come out, and another twist around the corner. Even when I wasn’t particularly enjoying the series, I still wanted to know what happened. That’s not nothing. A mystery has to make you care about the answer, and All Her Fault managed to keep me curious through eight episodes.
Unfortunately, getting to those answers was often a struggle. My biggest problem is that so much of the series feels exaggerated. Characters behave in ways that don’t make sense outside of what the plot needs them to do. Logistics bend around whatever dramatic moment needs to happen next. Secrets and revelations pile on top of one another until what begins as a compelling kidnapping mystery starts feeling more like a soap opera.
The performances didn’t help either. This is a talented cast, but the series frequently seems to give them two primary modes: crying and yelling. It also relies heavily on long reaction shots, asking the actors to communicate through a stare, a twitch, a strange look, or a face buried in their hands. Used occasionally, that can be effective. Here, it happens so often that I started noticing the performance rather than whatever emotion I was supposed to be feeling.
Dakota Fanning particularly feels underserved. Her character appears throughout the series, but too often it seemed as though Fanning was being asked to enter a scene and play another variation on material we’d already seen from her. I kept waiting for the character to become more interesting than the situation surrounding her.
The lack of subtlety extends to the mystery itself. All Her Fault loves foreshadowing, but sometimes it underlines a detail so aggressively that it stops being a clue and starts feeling like an announcement that THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT LATER. When the eventual payoff arrives, there’s less satisfaction in putting the pieces together because the show already spent so much time pointing at the piece it wanted me to remember.
That’s frustrating because one of the biggest reveals actually worked for me. The penultimate episode was easily my favorite of the series, finally explaining the circumstances surrounding the kidnapping in a way I found surprisingly satisfying. It took information we’d already been given and gave it new meaning rather than simply throwing another random twist at us.
Michael Peña also provides some of the series’ strongest moments as Detective Alcaras. An episode that spends more time with his son gives Peña material outside of the investigation, and his rapport with the young actor is terrific. As the parent of a child with developmental disabilities, those scenes hit particularly close to home for me. Peña brings a tenderness and nuance to that relationship that stood out from the heightened emotions surrounding so much of the rest of the series.
There are also ideas in All Her Fault that I wish had worked better. The title points directly toward one of them. The series is interested in the enormous pressure placed on mothers and the way women can be expected to manage careers, children, schedules, households, and everyone else’s needs while still being blamed when something goes wrong. That’s worthwhile territory, but the show pushes the men so far into caricature that it weakens the point it’s trying to make.
Rather than showing how otherwise ordinary relationships can fall into unequal patterns without anyone fully recognizing it, the husbands are frequently written as either selfish children or genuinely terrible people. At that point, the problem stops feeling like an invisible burden placed on women and starts feeling like these particular women married assholes. The exaggeration distracted me from the much more interesting idea underneath it.
And that’s ultimately my problem with All Her Fault. Almost everything gets pushed a little further than I needed it to go. The performances are bigger. The foreshadowing is louder. The family drama becomes increasingly extreme. The characters make decisions because another twist needs to happen.
There is absolutely an audience for this kind of show. If you like twisting domestic thrillers about wealthy families where every marriage has secrets, everyone is hiding something, and another revelation is always waiting around the corner, All Her Fault might be exactly what you’re looking for.
It just wasn’t for me.
There were enough questions to keep me watching, a few genuinely effective moments, and one episode that showed me the version of this series I might have really enjoyed. But when the mystery was finally over, it felt more like I had fulfilled an obligation than enjoyed a TV show.
TV Verdict: Not Clicking
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