The Australian retooling of Neil Forsyth’s excellent Guilt sees a brother and sister deal with the aftermath of accidentally killing a stranger. It’s a fast-paced, impressive ride.
A sibling’s advice
Just do what your elder sister tells you. That’s all there really is to leading an easy life. As a senior female sibling myself, this has always been my belief and now, as a viewer of Australian comedy-drama-caper-thriller Reckless, I can report it as absolute fact.
I mean – first things first. Ideally, do not hit a pedestrian out walking late at night in his pyjamas while you’re driving under the influence of a joint you smoked at a family wedding, as record shop owner Charlie (Hunter Page-Lochard) does. But if you do, and if the older sister you are taking home tells you to keep driving – well, at least give it some consideration? Especially before you get your fingerprints all over the corpse’s wallet and start dragging him out of the road in front of his neighbours’ houses, then putting him back into his home. And if you do do all that, at least start listening to her thereafter. Follow her lead, after she finds a letter in the dead man’s house about the terminal cancer he was suffering from, in thinking that you just saved him months of agony, then go about the rest of your life with your mouth shut.
A chaotic brother and a logical sister
Alas. Charlie is too sweet and chaotic a soul to do as his rigorously – not to say ruthlessly – logical sister June (Tasma Walton) suggests, nor to follow her damage limitation strategies thereafter. Which is bad news for them but good news for viewers, because what follows is a seamlessly preposterous-yet-plausible-under-the-suspended-disbelief-rules-of-the-genre that delivers a lot of bang for its four-hour buck.
Reckless is a retooling of Neil Forsyth’s excellent Leith-set series Guilt, which examined the descent of two brothers into a morass of moral and other horrors after they kill a man in a hit and should-have-run. Here it has been relocated to Fremantle, Perth and infused by its Indigenous (re-)creator Kodie Bedford with additional racial tensions that up the stakes and give a fresh spin to the whole.
The siblings are a First Nations family and part of June’s reaction comes from knowing that the odds will be unfairly stacked against them if they turn themselves in. More immediately, she does not want to lose the law firm she has built (and whose proceeds enabled her to buy her bumbling brother the record shop that keeps him afloat, because older sisters are great), nor Charlie to lose contact with his daughter and become “just another absent Black father in prison”.
Complications and a drunken investigator
Unfortunately, she neglects to tell him not to drop his wallet in George’s (for so is the dead man named) house, so Charlie ends up going to the wake to try to retrieve it. Whereupon he becomes enmeshed with George’s one remaining living relative, his English niece Sharne (Jessica De Gouw). June, learning to work with what she’s got, advises him to stay close to her until she’s signed all the estate paperwork and gone back to the UK.
Alas, Sharne is of an enquiring mind, and is perturbed both by the police report’s mention of bruising on the body and by the damage to her uncle’s pyjamas and other inconsistencies that start to accrue. This is when June introduces Roddy (Clarence Ryan) into the narrative mix – a shambolically drunken private investigator she recently fired but who she insists to Sharne is the best of the best (“Comes from a long line of bush trackers,” she says, as he stares blankly at the torn PJs before falling over). June’s assumption is that Roddy will be useless and/or report what they tell him to report. But Roddy seizes on the case as a chance for redemption, sobers up and starts running down every lead he can. And then there are the neighbours.
The lies, obfuscations, porch cameras, contradictions, complications, near-misses arrive at pace. Only one episode was available for review but I can see that you might start wishing for a little breathing room, a bit of a gap before the next eccentric character or villainous twist comes into play – but this is to quibble. Reckless is a fantastic, fun ride grounded by a realistically fractious but at heart loving relationship between the siblings, the light but piercing commentary on the wider racial and socioeconomic dynamics at work in Australia that illuminate rather than halt the action, and a cast of credible, however idiosyncratic, characters whose size makes the tonal consistency all the more wildly impressive. Many balls juggled, none dropped. Reckless is, underneath its flourishes, a masterpiece of control. Reckless aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now in the UK, and is on SBS on Demand in Australia.
