This Liane Moriarty adaptation has a terrific ensemble, but a fanciful plot
The Last Anniversary
★★★
Binge, March 27
Another adaptation of a Liane Moriarty novel (an industry in itself now), this six-part series holds few surprises, even for those who haven’t read the bestseller, although this time at least, the setting is kept in Australia. Although perhaps an Australia aimed at an international market, given that the action takes place on the fictitious Scribbly Gum Island, at once a private idyll and not too far from Sydney’s CBD that its privileged locals can have jobs on “the mainland”.
Teresa Palmer as Sophie Honeywell in The Last Anniversary.
As with most of Moriarty’s stories, The Last Anniversary is a character-driven drama laid over a mystery, this one centred around a 50-year-old puzzle which, in the storyline, is one of Australia’s greatest unsolved cases. The Baby Munro Mystery draws tourists to Scribbly Gum to the scene of an old shack where a newborn baby was left alone all those decades ago, her parents, Alice and Jack Munro, having seemingly disappeared.
That baby is now 50-year-old Enigma (Helen Thomson), who runs the tours, and is the centre of the Doughty family, long-term residents of the island. Enigma was raised by the two Doughty sisters, Connie (Angela Punch McGregor), who has just died, and her sister Rose (Miranda Richardson managing an excellent Australian accent).
Most of their extended family also lives on the island – Connie’s daughter Margie (Susan Prior), unhappily married to Ron (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor), their daughter Veronika (Danielle Macdonald), Enigma’s daughter Grace (Claude Scott-Mitchell, the standout in the cast) and her husband Callum (Uli Latukefu). Currently at the island is also Margie’s son Thomas, who has been kicked out of home by his wife. It’s a lot.
So many cast members, so many family secrets.
After Connie dies, it’s revealed that rather than leave her massive house to anyone in the family, she has chosen instead to bequeath it to Sophie (Teresa Palmer), a former girlfriend of Thomas’, who works as a writer for what sounds like a downmarket women’s mag, and who is, of course, an incurable romantic without a family of her own.
Despite some early shock, the Doughtys accept Sophie as an island inhabitant (even though she can’t even bake a cake!), and soon she’s trying to solve the Baby Munro case (quickly finding information at the library that nobody else in five decades has discovered).
