All Her Fault: I Came for the Mystery. I Was Not Prepared for the Familiarity.
A missing-child mystery that keeps me guessing while bringing the fears, pressures, and impossible calculations of parenting much closer to home than I expected.
In-progress review and spoiler note: I have not finished the series yet. This piece includes some spoilers for the premise and character storylines, and it discusses a missing child and the fears that brings up.
I was doomscrolling when I came across about thirty seconds of a scene. I did not know whether it was the beginning of a show or something from the middle of an episode. All I knew was that it immediately made me think, huh, I really want to know what happens next. So I went through the comments, found the name—All Her Fault—and started watching. My husband was sitting beside me, so I asked whether he wanted to watch too. I knew nothing about it. Not the genre, not the cast, not even that Dakota Fanning was in it.
The opening is simple enough: Marissa Irvine, played by Sarah Snook, arrives to collect her son Milo from a playdate. Except the woman answering the door does not know her son. He is not there. What should have been an ordinary pickup becomes something horrifying. (Peacock’s official introduction to All Her Fault)
From the beginning, it had us guessing. But what has kept me watching is not only the question of who took the child. It is how many of these people feel familiar. Their fears, their selfishness, their sacrifices, even the ways they manage to make an already awful situation worse. I do not necessarily like them all. I can still recognise them.
Marissa’s panic got to me immediately. I kept wondering what I would have done differently. Could she have done something better? Could she have prevented it? Is it her fault? The title does not exactly let you leave that question alone.
I am the mother of a six-year-old boy who is on the spectrum. One day, my son walked out of our house. We found him just two houses to the left, within minutes, but those minutes really, really scared me. Finding him quickly did not make the fear insignificant. Watching Marissa brought that moment back, along with the horrible thought of how much worse it could have been. I was watching her look for her child while remembering what it felt like not knowing where mine was.
Then there is Jenny, Dakota Fanning’s character, and the pressure of trying to make work and family life fit together. (People: Sarah Snook and Dakota Fanning on their All Her Fault characters) She gets to me for a different reason. She is trying to make her marriage work, make parenting work, keep everything functioning. Work-wise, time-wise, ego-wise—she keeps having to give something up. And somehow she is still the needy one.
Her husband, Richie, is particularly annoying because he feels real. He wants to keep being himself, keep his time, keep his freedom. I understand wanting those things. What I cannot stand is his apparent refusal to see that preserving all of that for himself means his wife has to keep giving up hers. He behaves as though the extra work is something she has personally invented and is now unfairly asking him to participate in. Meanwhile, she is drowning. That is a very recognisable kind of selfishness, which makes it much harder to dismiss as just television.
Michael Peña’s Detective Alcaras is another character I connected with: a detective trying to do his job while also parenting a son with significant support needs. (Us Weekly: Michael Peña on why he joined All Her Fault) His circumstances are not identical to mine, but I recognise the worry. He wants his son to have a good life, and wanting that does not make the practical difficulties disappear. Watching him brought up questions I already carry every day: how will my son manage when we are gone? Where will he be? Who will understand him and make sure he is looked after? Those questions do not need a crime plot to frighten me.
The people around the family make the mystery more complicated too. There is Colin, Marissa’s friend and business partner, with his gambling history; Lia, Milo’s aunt, who is in recovery; and Brian, his disabled uncle. (TIME’s review of All Her Fault) The way Brian gets treated like a child bothers me. Peter’s lying and apparent need to be the hero bother me differently. Everyone seems to have something they are hiding, defending or refusing to face. I keep changing my mind about whom I trust.
And the acting makes all of this work. Even the annoying parent-group representative is convincing enough to make me think, yes, I know this type of person. Unfortunately. These do not feel like characters who become difficult only because the plot needs another obstacle. They feel like people whose ordinary flaws have followed them into a crisis.
I have not finished the show, so I cannot tell you whether the ending holds up. But I just watched an episode where someone raised the possibility that Milo might no longer be alive, and that stopped my breathing for a moment.
My mind did what it often does: it tried to put the situation into a version involving me. Except this time, there was an immediate resistance. Almost like magnetic repulsion. The image started forming, and my mind would not let it settle around me and my son. I could not go there. I had to physically shake myself out of the feeling.
So far, I really like All Her Fault. The investigation keeps me interested, the drama works, and the performances make even the people I cannot stand worth watching. But this is not a comfortable watch for me. I am not just guessing who committed the crime. I am recognising fears I already have, in several different people, for several different reasons.
I started watching because I wanted to know what happened next. I still do. I just did not expect a thirty-second clip to lead me quite so close to home.