Little Disasters: the thriller series about maternal anxiety

Jess, a successful architect, is the mother of three children: two school-aged sons and Betsy, just ten months old. She lives in a luxurious house, has a loving husband, and her life seems typical of the London upper class. In Little Disasters, the seemingly perfect facade crumbles when Jess takes Betsy to the emergency room, believing the child has some virus, only to discover that the on-call pediatrician is Liz, her long-time friend.

However, tests reveal something far more worrying: a fracture inconsistent with a simple accidental fall. Liz faces a dilemma and must decide whether to believe her friend's confused and incoherent version or follow protocols and call social services. She chooses the latter, triggering a series of increasingly dramatic consequences, with Jess and Ed temporarily losing custody of the little girl. The series then proceeds through two parallel timelines: the present where detectives, social workers, and lawyers try to shed light on what really happened, and numerous flashbacks showing how Jess, Liz, and two other friends met in a prenatal class, retracing the salient phases of their now tormented bond.

Little Disasters: from page to screen

We are faced with yet another adaptation of a contemporary bestseller, namely the eponymous 2020 novel by Sarah Vaughan, also author of Anatomy of a Scandal, which falls into the crowded subgenre of domestic thrillers centered on wealthy women whose seemingly idyllic lives hide shadows. A narrative territory obsessively explored in recent years, from Big Little Lies to The Undoing, up to the more recent All Her Fault which we recently discussed on these very pages.

A six-episode project, Little Disasters tries to rely on an ensemble cast led by an intense Diane Kruger, ready to step into the uncomfortable shoes of a woman accused of negligence or worse towards her youngest child. A situation that risks deeply destabilizing her marriage and her closest friendships, in a story that tries to update those intricate games of truth and lies to which contemporary seriality has accustomed us.

The Icelandic director Eva Sigurðardóttir, behind the camera for the entire season, relies on a lucid and controlled aesthetic, building tension through claustrophobic shots when Jess is under constant observation by those who must deem her fit or unfit for motherhood, using the camera to emphasize the protagonist's progressive isolation from her social world. There are also sorts of "interviews" with the main female figures, called upon to give a moral judgment on the protagonist who feels increasingly alone and lost in her very personal battle to assert her version of events.

Pros and cons

Where Little Disasters is most convincing is in resisting the temptation to turn the material into easy melodrama, instead maintaining a relatively subdued tone even in the most emotionally charged moments, relying on the performances of the heterogeneous cast. A successful choice that only suffers from a bit of slowness in the central episodes, where little or nothing truly fundamental happens, to the point that one or two fewer episodes would certainly not have been a scandal.

The most painful note, however, comes from that ending where the sensational plot twist once again changes all the cards on the table, complete with a flashback scene that clearly shows us what really happened in those frantic hours preceding the prologue. Guilt and culprits are mixed in an all too predictable epilogue, almost a shortcut to avoid potential ambiguities: it's a shame that it was precisely on such ambiguities that the story had found its best moments until then, and this meticulously explained conclusion leaves a bitter taste.