Mysterious past plays large role in ‘Stay Close’
The English crime miniseries “Stay Close” sprinkles clues, which may or may not actually be clues, among characters who may or may not have valuable information to share. Perhaps that’s what all crime stories do on some level, but this one — based on a 2012 novel by megaselling Harlan Coben (which was set in Atlantic City) — takes somber delight in hiding the goods like a dog burying its bones. Or maybe it’s just that the two episodes made available for review can’t quite scrape the payoff on their own.
“Stay Close” is one of those past-comes-back-to-haunt-you tales in which something really bad happened years ago and sent multiple lives into a tailspin. The main player is Megan (Cush Jumbo, of “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight”), about to be married to her boyfriend of 16 years, raising their three children in helicopter-mom fashion. Except, of course, she has a past, which comes complete with a different name and a career dancing at an upscale shady bar that looks from the outside like a neon Edward Hopper fever dream.
Soon we meet the rest of the human dominoes knocked down by their personal histories. There’s Lorraine (Sarah Parish), an old friend of Megan’s; Broome (James Nesbitt), a cop obsessed with a long-cold missing person’s case; and Ray (Richard Armitage), a sort of sub-paparazzi photographer who, like David Hemmings in “Blow-Up,” inadvertently stumbles upon something bloody. They all have one person in common: that cold case, a foreboding figure named Stewart Green (Rod Hunt), who has stealthily arrived back on the scene to stoke some fears and guilty consciences.
In moving the action from Atlantic City to a British seaside town, the miniseries, part of a five-year deal between Coben and Netflix, invites memories of and comparisons to the likes of “Broadchurch,” “The Red Riding Trilogy” and other English thrillers that walk on the dark side. But “Stay Close” isn’t quite as sinister as all that, at least not through the first two episodes. There’s a smoothness to its surface, which isn’t always a bad thing. Nesbitt’s weariness comes with a silky swagger, and the police headquarters where Broome operates has a comically sterile sheen. Megan’s fiance, who, wait for it, isn’t what he seems, has a thing for goofy T-shirts.
Jumbo’s performance is the show’s fulcrum, her face the barometer of any given situation’s gravity. “Stay Close” has roots in the film noir tradition of characters who can’t outrun their pasts or atone for sins they’d rather forget. Megan is the extreme example of this idea, a woman with two identities: one for a wild past, one for a fretful present. There’s a touch of Hitchcock to Megan’s split, and also to a couple of specific sequences: a tennis match sequence that borrows happily from “Strangers on a Train,” and a car gurgling to the bottom of a lake, a la “Psycho.”
It would appear that nobody’s hands are entirely clean here. “Stay Close” builds its puzzle slowly, through subliminal editing of past violence and through the silences in what the characters don’t say to each other — empty spaces that invite us to imagine what happened to these people all those years ago.