Stay Close: Harlan Coben Strikes Again

Simon Greene is an apparently ordinary man, whose perfect existence – loving wife, three children, a solid career, and a beautiful home – actually hides enormous cracks, ready to come to light over the eight episodes of Stay Close. The family tragedy that marked the Greenes' lives is the disappearance of Paige, the eldest daughter who fell into the abyss of drug addiction after falling in love with Aaron, the classic "wrong guy" who progressively isolated her from her parents and dragged her into a world of violence and degradation.

After six months of fruitless searching, Simon casually spots Paige in a public park, reduced to a pitiful state. The attempted reunion degenerates in the worst way: Simon loses control and brutally assaults her boyfriend in front of dozens of witnesses, going viral in a video published online. Paige, of course, disappears again, and when Aaron is found dead a few hours later, Simon becomes the main suspect: detectives Isaac Fagbenle and Ruby Todd will face a complicated case, while a tenacious private investigator conducts inquiries that seem to lead to a mysterious cult and a pair of psychopathic killers.

Stay Close: A Bit of Everything

Those already familiar with the style of writer Harlan Coben will have an idea of what awaits them in this miniseries, a new exclusive to the Netflix catalog that adapts the novel of the same name. Obviously, marital betrayals, secret identities, multiple murders, generational traumas, blackmail, corruption, and so on, emerge in a whirlwind of plot twists that are now the author's trademark, who seems to have understood how to intercept the tastes of the general public without too much effort. Stay Close proceeds with an often improbable accumulation of situations and plot twists, with almost every episode ending with a sudden revelation or a potential climactic scene, to the detriment of narrative balance and verisimilitude.

It's a dizzying ensemble that certainly has more appeal on paper but in live-action format, thanks to the pace of seriality, risks excessively weighing down an increasingly cumbersome and inconclusive tangle, with the protagonists often victims of their own stupidity or, conversely, blessed by luck when they make blatant mistakes without any consequences.

Racing to the End

The tight editing that tries to avoid dead time and the numerous strategically placed flashbacks that reveal crucial information at the right moment, create a sense of insistent disorientation, then forcing the script into sudden turns to bring the plot back to its original path. A race against time that leaves little room for boredom but equally little for reflection, destined to be consumed obsessively just to find out how it ends, only to quickly forget it at the end credits of the season finale.

For a good number of viewers, a breaking point will soon be reached beyond which coincidences become exaggerated, plot twists absurd, and narrative conveniences unbearable. And above all, the large number of main figures involved takes away breath and depth from the central ones: from the two young killers in the vein of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994) to the private detective who stops at nothing, the supporting cast often risks becoming an unintentional caricature. And the cast itself, led by the afflicted father James Nesbitt and the mother Minnie Driver, for much of the series in a state of deep coma, seems ill-matched, having little material to work with in the often elementary and predictable characterization of their respective roles.