The Clearing, Disney’s first home-grown drama, is a sure-fire cult hit

The Clearing, Disney+; first two episodes May 24
★★★★

For its first foray into locally produced drama for its streaming platform Disney+, the world’s greatest purveyor of family entertainment has chosen a story about The Family, the real-life Melbourne cult that operated, largely in secret, from the mid-1960s until the late 1980s under the leadership of yoga teacher Anne Hamilton-Byrne. It’s an inspired choice.

The Clearing is a fictionalised account of The Family, the Melbourne cult led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne.Credit: Narelle Portanier/Disney+

Based on the 2020 novel In The Clearing by J.P. Pomare, The Clearing is a fictionalised take on the cult that burst into the public eye in 1987 when police raided its large bush property in the Dandenongs, taking into protective custody half a dozen children dressed in identical clothing, all with dyed blonde hair.

They had been adopted as babies, raised as if they were Hamilton-Byrne’s natural children, and beaten, starved and dosed with LSD in a bid to encourage them towards full consciousness.

The Clearing takes those basic elements and weaves from them a moody, slow-burn thriller about one woman’s attempts to cast off the legacy of a childhood of cult-ordained abuse.

Freya (Teresa Palmer) appears at first glance to be an unnaturally and unreasonably anxious mother, always seeming to detect in passing cars the potential for her son Billy to be abducted. But her paranoia is not without basis; as a child, she was a cult member known as Amy (Julia Savage), and had a hand in just such a terrible act.

As in Pomare’s novel, the story here is bifurcated: we get Amy’s tale and we get Freya’s. Biologically, it’s the same person. Psychologically … well, that’s more complex.

Freya is the post-liberation version of Amy, but can a person ever really shake off the damage wrought by years in a cult, raised under the tough-love regime of a woman like Adrienne Beaufort (Miranda Otto), a perfectly coiffed and manicured monster?

On the basis of the four episodes (of eight) made available for preview, the answer appears to be no.

The mood is as damp and dank as the setting, by the shores of Lake Eildon, with Jeffrey Walker’s chilly direction wringing maximum value from the taut scripts by Matt Cameron and Elise McCredie.

Miranda Otto as Adrienne Beaufort, a character inspired by Anne Hamilton-Byrne.Credit: Disney

Palmer is terrific, making Freya’s fierce independence, heightened fear and crippling sense of shame completely believable. She defines herself as both mother and daughter, yet her experience of each of those roles has been utterly corrupted.

Otto breathes a distant, unknowable life into the guru-mother known as Matrea. She breezes in and out of the cult’s bush compound, bringing with her an air of both radiant love and relentless menace.

Her acolytes – including Guy Pearce as Dr Bryce Latham (based, one assumes, on the real-life psychologist and spiritualist Raynor Johnson, whose bush property became the cult’s base) and Kate Mulvany as his mousey former wife – seem almost as intimidated by her as her “children”, and equally in her thrall.

Teresa Palmer as Freya.Credit: Ben King/Disney+

The Clearing gives us in Adrienne a wicked stepmother to rival any in the extensive Disney canon, only this one is anchored in the real. It’s an impressive first swing in the streamer’s local drama game. Here’s hoping there’s much more to come.

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