Playing Gracie Darling review: spooky mystery stands out from the pack

Australian television loves a good mystery. What they don’t seem to love quite so much is a good spooky mystery, which is what separates Playing Gracie Darling from the pack. Yes, it’s another small-town mystery where a dark and deadly past haunts the present – only this time, there’s a strong sense that the haunting part is literal.

Playing Gracie Darling: the past

Back in 1997, a group of teens went out to a cabin in the woods to hold a séance, and even if you’ve never seen a horror movie in your life you know this is not going to end well. ‘We open ourselves to the spirit world and command evil to stay outside the circle,’ says the host of the séance, Gracie Darling (Kristina Bogic). Yeah, good luck with that.

They’re trying to contact someone called Levi, a spirit trapped in limbo who – amongst other things – says via the Ouija board that he’s been watching the girls in the shower. Instead of hanging up on him they keep going, and things rapidly get worse. ‘Let me out,’ Levi insists, first one way then another; in the turmoil that follows, Gracie’s bestie Joni Grey (Eloise Rothfield) flees the cabin.

Playing Gracie Darling: the present

Jump forward 27 years and the now mother of two Joni (Morgana O’Reilly) spends her days in an institution – don’t worry, she works there as a child psychologist – and comes home at night to her mother (Harriet Walter) doing tarot readings for her kids. So nothing heightened or supernatural going on there.

Watch the Playing Gracie Darling trailer.

Then she receives a phone call from old friend and fellow séance survivor Jay Rajeswaran (Rudi Dharmalingam) telling her another Darling girl’s gone missing ‘just like Gracie”’ And not so much ‘just like’ as ‘exactly like’: when she vanished her and her friends were back in the old forest cabin playing ‘Gracie Darling’, a copycat séance the local teens have been holding since the original disappearance.

Of course Joni can’t stay away, and despite the initial disapproval of Jay, who’s now the local cop but is off the case for being too close to things, she soon starts her own ad hoc investigation into this latest disappearance. Jay’s daughter Raffy (Saiesha Sundaralingam) was friends with the missing Frankie Darling and was there the night she vanished. ‘Something evil got inside her,’ she tells Joni, ‘something called … Levi?’

Playing Gracie Darling: the supernatural divide

There’s a lot happening here on both sides of the supernatural divide and Playing Gracie Darling largely keeps its cards close to its chest. Created by Miranda Nation, and directed by Jonathan Brough, it’s as much about personal perceptions as anything, with everyone holding tight to their own version of events – or their own version of reality.

It may not descend directly into outright horror (it’s an Australian prime-time drama after all) but the tone is more unsettling than your usual six-part small town mystery. In the three episodes available to critics, it does a solid job of keeping things nice and uneasy.

Everywhere Joni and Jay turn, there’s motives and suspects. The Darlings are big supporters of the locally divisive wind farm, which has made them enemies in town. Frankie’s mother Ruth (Celia Pacquola) wants people out there searching; her own mother, having been through this before, is more about thoughts and prayers.

Numerous flashbacks to Gracie and Joni in their teens only deepens the mystery. Early adventures are all mixtapes and bike rides; after the séance, Joni has her own stay in a creepy institution where trying to contact the dead is seen as therapeutic. Hope her insurance is paying for that.

Meanwhile in the present, the ill omens mount. Dead birds are everywhere; the secret symbol that the teen girls created haunts the adult Joni, and a flaming effigy in main street is, according to Jay, just someone ‘sending a message’. The new generation of teens have their own issues, and the adults around them might not be as trustworthy as they seem.

Playing Gracie Darling: a local returns

The other element that makes this more than yet another story of a scenic town scarred by a dark past where a fresh mystery can only be solved by the return of a former local for whom everything going on is personal (Australian drama certainly does have a type) is Joni’s investigation. Refreshingly, it’s largely a case of her just turning up around the place and asking awkward questions.

Early on she walks into the Darling’s house because the back door was open. Not surprisingly, Ruth is like ‘uh, can you please leave?’. Later on Joni starts questioning a bunch of random teens in the street and the only reason they don’t shout ‘Narc!’ is because it’s written all over their faces.

Her profession has given her the tools to find easy answers to what’s going on, but with a girl still missing – and possibly a killer out there – talk of shared trauma and ‘mass sociogenic illness’ isn’t going to cut it. The only thing for sure is that whatever’s going on in that forest, it’s bad news.

That sense that here maybe there are no firm answers, that what’s going on really is something beyond rational explanation, is what takes Playing Gracie Darling beyond the usual mystery cliches and makes it into a compelling – you might even say haunting – watch.

All six episodes of Playing Gracie Darling are available to stream on Paramount+ from 14 August 2025.

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