Harlan Coben has unarguably been one of the greatest beneficiaries of the Netflix wave. The American author has struck a multi-million dollar deal with the streaming giant, which will ultimately see as many as 14 of his page-turners making their way to screen in the form of films or series.
Stay Close is the latest from the Coben stable to make its way to Netflix after 2020’s The Stranger, and is trademarked by the Coben staples of suburban dark lives with darker secrets, a compelling mystery at its core and enough twists and turns at the end of each of its eight cliffhanger episodes to guarantee a more or less satisfying viewer experience.
Employing the familiar trope of one’s murky past rearing its ugly head after years and threatening to destroy an almost perfect present, built brick by brick and relationship by relationship, Stay Close doesn’t offer much that’s new, but makes for some pretty engaging binge-watching. Better than allowing your mind to be occupied, and obsessed, with which Covid variant is going to strike the world next.
Rooted in noir, there are as many characters as there are cliches in this familiar template of the past overshadowing the present and a string of missing men tied together by a common thread, but Stay Close has enough ingredients of a traditional thriller (despite some plot holes here and there) to keep you hooked.
Set in Britain, Stay Close has Cush Jumbo playing Megan, the pivot around which the show revolves. A suburban mother of three who is all set to say ‘I do’ to the father of her children, Megan finds her life on the verge of being torn asunder when someone gets wind of the fact that she not only used to be a popular stripper by the name of Cassie, but that she also bolted without rhyme or reason when an obsessive client of hers named Stewart Green (played by Rod Hunt) went mysteriously missing, never to be found again.
As Megan secretly does her bit to find out who is out to get her, a young man going missing on exactly the same day as Green did 17 years ago, and that soon gets the cops going. Before long, the brooding detective Mike Broome (James Nesbitt) and his partner Erin (who also happens to be his ex-wife, adding to the layers of their already tenuous equation) chance upon the fact that many others, all men, have gone missing around the same date every year. That sets the stage for a decent watch that includes a drug snorting lawyer (played by Eddie Izzard), a suspicious photographer with enough motive and mystery (After The Stranger, Richard Armitage shows up once again in a Harlen Coben thriller), and inexplicably — and often irritatingly — a pair of dancing bounty hunters/ assassins that simply go by the names Barbie and Ken.
Red herrings abound in the initial episodes, planting seeds of suspicion in the viewer’s mind about almost every character. Multiple lives are sent into a tailspin, and in the tradition of a good thriller, Stay Close makes us believe that nobody’s hands are entirely clean here.
Transposing the action to the UK results in the screen adaptation being tempered with a flavour which is slightly different from the book. The series is presumably set somewhere in north England, but viewers familiar with the area scape have pointed out geographical errors in the show’s filming, with locations several hundred kilometres apart being depicted as neighbourhoods.
Add to that is the fact that Stay Close is not a watertight thriller, the writing conveniently papering over quite a few contrivances. However, if you are looking for a starry, binge-able watch that gets you through a few hours, this is quite a good pick.
BLURB
Stay Close is not a watertight thriller, the writing conveniently papering over quite a few contrivances. However, if you are looking for a starry, binge-able watch that gets you through a few hours, this is quite a good pick
