This was published 2 years ago
Superb drama The Staircase finds new twists in infamous murder case
By Karl Quinn
The Staircase
★★★★½
If you’ve seen the Netflix documentary series The Staircase, you might be wondering what more there is to say about the death of Kathleen Peterson and the subsequent murder trial of her husband Michael. The answer, it transpires, is a lot.
That Antonio Campos, who created and directs the bulk of this superb dramatised version of events, has found so many new twists on such a well-worn path is remarkable. After all, Frenchman Jean-Xavier de Lestrade didn’t just make one documentary series, he made three.
Colin Firth as Michael Peterson and Toni Collette as Kathleen in The Staircase.Credit: HBO/Binge
The first eight episodes were released in 2004 after the conviction, the next two in 2012 following Peterson’s release after a judge ruled the lead forensic investigator had falsified evidence, and the final tranche came in 2018 (when Netflix bundled all 13 episodes together), when Peterson – who was by then 73 years old – accepted a guilty plea in return for a sentence of time already served to avoid the expense and emotional trauma of a new trial.
What’s more, de Lestrade and his crew were right there in the courtroom as the trial played out, and right there at the Peterson dining table as the family and lawyers strategised. The access was incredible, the story endlessly fascinating.
And yet, in Campos’ telling, so much was left unsaid.
To a degree, the drama is a rebuttal of the doc (as I shall henceforth call them, to avoid confusion), or at the very least a detailed cross-examination. It opens with a quote from the gospel of St John, in which Christ proclaims he has been brought into the world “to bear witness to the truth”, to which Pontius Pilate responds, “truth; what is that?”
The real Michael Peterson in a scene from the documentary series The Staircase.Credit: Netflix
The doc asked that question of the trial process; now the drama asks it of the doc.
De Lestrade (Vincent Vermignon) and his producer, Denis Poncet (Frank Feys), are not merely observers here but participants in the narrative, at odds over Peterson’s innocence or guilt. Their editor goes even further, falling utterly for the man she comes to know frame by frame. How, Campos asks, can that not have swayed the story the doc told?
Colin Firth is superb as Michael Peterson, a novelist, a narcissist and a bisexual (a not insignificant detail in conservative North Carolina). He’s a proven liar too, having falsely claimed to have been awarded a Purple Heart in the Vietnam War – but does that make him a killer?
As Kathleen, a high-flying executive who appears to be falling out of love with her husband, Toni Collette gives convincing voice to a woman who was little more than a series of gruesome forensic photographs in the doc.
Fellow Australians Olivia DeJonge and Odessa Young are terrific as two of the five children in this complicated blended household. Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones), Dane DeHaan and Patrick Schwarzenegger all breathe real, complex life into the rest of the brood, which appears far less unified here than it did in the doc.
Martha (Young) particularly emerges as a character riven by doubt, wanting to believe the man she calls Dad is innocent, but struggling to reconcile it with the fact not one, but two women in his life have met a terrible end – the other being her biological mother 20 years earlier.
Happy family: The Peterson clan includes adopted sisters Martha (Odessa Young) and Margaret (Sophie Turner).Credit: HBO/Binge
“It is kind of a weird coincidence that we’ve had two moms die at the bottom of the stairs,” she says to Margaret (Turner) at one point.
“So, you think there’s some connection,” asks Margaret, before brushing aside the suspicions with an act of faith, of will, of self-preservation.
“Dad’s been there for us always,” she says. “He didn’t have to take us in, but he did. That’s all that matters, so stop questioning everything.”
“I can’t,” yells Martha. “I can’t, I can’t.”
Neither can Campos. And thank goodness for that.
The Staircase is available on Binge from May 5.
Email the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin
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