Chilling real-life event behind new TV thriller All Her Fault starring Aussie actress Sarah Snook
A mother’s brief moment of panic outside an empty house has transformed into a gripping new thriller starring Sarah Snook as a parent living every mother’s nightmare.
Do you ever reach for your phone when watching a movie or TV series to check if it’s based on a true story? Us, too!
Our latest deep dive was sparked by the new heart-pumping Peacock series All Her Fault, which is now streaming locally on BINGE.
The US series stars Aussie actress Sarah Snook about a mum named Marissa who goes to pick up her son, Milo, from a playdate, only to find that the person who opens the door is a complete who has never heard of her 5-year-old child.
Adding to the unthinkable events, the mum Marissa thought she had been texting about the playdate, Jenny Kaminski (played by Dakota Fanning), had no idea what she was talking about when she contacted Jenny’s real number.
Chilling, right? And it’s made even more so given the plot is inspired by real-life events.
All Her Fault is based on Andrea Mara’s 2021 novel of the same name, and the author herself revealed in a previous social media video that the premise of the book is based on an incident that occurred one afternoon in suburban Dublin back in 2015.
Stream All Her Fault now on BINGE, available on Hubbl.
At the time, Mara, an Irish crime novelist, went to collect her daughter from a playdate, only to find herself standing outside an unoccupied house. The house was empty and the family was nowhere to be seen, so within a few excruciating seconds, she was in panic mode.
“The panic only lasted for a few seconds, until a neighbour told me that the family had moved house a few weeks earlier and I was just working off an old address list,” the author said in a YouTube video shared before her book release in 2021.
“It all ended very quickly, much more quickly than it does for Marissa in the book,” she said, while adding that “the fear – that primal, gut-level fear – stayed with me”.
In an essay published in The Irish Independent that same year, Mara revealed more about the incident. In the essay, she wrote that she while she reconnected with her daughter five minutes later, she often wondered what would have happened if the outcome had turned out differently.
The incident made Mara think about “how much trust we place in other people when it comes to our kids; when we send them off to school and crèche andplaymatess and parties.”
“How do we decide what’s safe and not safe, when it comes to our kids?” she wrote. “And why do parents today seem to worry more than ever?”
The real-life events birthed Mara’s novel which has now been turned into a thrilling TV series. The show follows Marissa, a successful lawyer whose life is turned upside down when her young son vanishes from what she thought was a mundane playdate.
But as her picture-perfect life shatters, secrets begin to unravel about her neighbours, nanny, business partner, in-laws and even her husband (played Jake Lacy).
“We had to reshoot the opening scene because when we did it the first time it was it was almost too emotional,” Snook, a mum of one, told news.com.au last week to promote the series.
“We had to find a way to gently allow the audience to absorb this information at the same rate that Marissa is doing it, and also to clarify who Marissa is as a person and that she’s much less likely to jump to anxiety first.
“She’s more likely to get all the information, but you can’t repress it for very long because it’s your child and you don’t know where they are. It’s a very compelling opening scene.”
All episodes of All Her Fault are streaming now on Binge.
Originally published as Chilling real-life event behind new TV thriller All Her Fault starring Aussie actress Sarah Snook
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