Harlan Coben’s Shelter review – this twisty thriller is as charming as The Goonies
It feels odd to call an adaptation of a Harlan Coben thriller “charming”, but the eight-part Shelter series is just that. Netflix acquired crime writer Coben’s big standalone novels in a five-year, multimillion-pound deal for the rights to 14 of his 34 books, and its renewal in 2022 is thought to have included the best-selling Myron Bolitar series, too. But Prime Video has nabbed his young adult series, whose protagonist is Myron’s nephew, Mickey; this is a dramatisation of the first Mickey book.
It has slightly less gore than usual and an even more madly corkscrewing plot. But the charm – reminiscent of early teen fare, such as The Goonies, that the 80s offered while it waited for you to graduate to John Hughes – is still an unexpected bonus.
Jaden Michael (last seen in 2021 as the adolescent NBA star turned activist Colin Kaepernick in TV drama Colin in Black & White) is Mickey. His mixture of quiet confidence and sweetness, even amid his grief after recently losing his father and nearly his mother in a car crash, draws you to him and gives you someone to hang on to as the rollercoaster narrative flings you this way and that.
After the crash, Mickey is living resentfullywith his aunt Shira (Constance Zimmer)in his father’s childhood hometownof Kasselton, New Jersey, while he waits for his mother to be released from the facility where she is being treated for depression. (In the books, she has a drug addiction; perhaps this was changed to make things more palatable to a TV audience, which is often more wide-ranging than a literary one.)
On his first day at high school, he befriends Ashley (Samantha Bugliaro), another newcomer. We see her being surreptitiously photographed by a teacher; the following day she goes missing. Soon, a small Scooby-Doo gang assembles around Mickey to help him discover her whereabouts. There is the oddball hacker Spoon (Adrian Greensmith, who gives a lovely performance, although it seems to come from a more comic show) and fellow social outcast Ema (Abby Corrigan, who adds to the evanescent 80s feel by looking like a cross between Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club and Winona Ryder).
But they must also contend with all the other oddities that a thriller set in suburban New Jersey throws up: school bullies; a nasty, borderline-racist local cop; a boy who disappeared 27 years ago on the same date as Ashley vanished; a web of backstories, including one between the bad cop and Mickey’s aunt; and a history teacher who taught Mickey’s father, Brad, and now spends her spare time reading websites about the missing boy. There are also, elsewhere, growing sapphic vibes.
Oh, and let us not forget the huge gothic mansion in which Brad once got trapped, after which he “was never quite the same”. It is inhabited by a feared crone known as the Bat Lady