Disney+ premieres its first Australian drama The Clearing
Viewers may experience a jolt of recognition from Australian series The Clearing, a psycho-thriller centred around a woman with a blonde blow-wave.
The Clearing, a new eight-part Australian series starting next week, does a very good job at establishing a creepy mood. A child is abducted during a school bus run. There’s a weird-looking group of children living together, dressed in uniforms and all with white-bleached hair. The story is filmed around Lake Eildon in Victoria, and the chill water and low mist set a disquieting tone.
Adding to the weirdness is the filmmakers’ deliberate efforts to disorient the viewer, as the action jumps between the present day and – judging from the cars and the clothes people are wearing – back to the mid-1980s. Through the accumulation of strange details it becomes clear that we’ve entered the compound of some kind of cult called the Kindred, led by a glamorous-looking woman with stylish clothes and a chauffeur-driven car.
Jeffrey Walker, lead director on The Clearing, says the show is one of the most disturbing he has worked on.
“Without doubt, it was the most emotionally, personally challenging project to get into – it just stays with your subconscious, in your dreams, it’s awful,” he says. “You are channelling that constantly. But that also made it an intriguing project.”
Walker, who directed the series with Gracie Otto, says the period details and locations in Victoria were carefully chosen and play a large part in establishing atmosphere. The series is the first original Australian drama to come from global streamer Disney+.
“This is a psychological thriller at its core,” Walker says. “All of the visuals take care of themselves in many ways. We shot in winter, which is perfect for this evocative story, to be able to create a visual mood. Everyone’s rugged up and the fog is rolling in … It was a massive location job and we had an extraordinary team to bring it together across eight episodes.”
The series is not a docudrama but is based on a novel, In the Clearing, by JP Pomare. Still, there’s no escaping the jolt of recognition many viewers will have about the scenario.
The female leader, the abducted children and the identical hairstyles all point to the Family, the New Age sect ruled by Anne Hamilton-Byrne and whose activities captivated and appalled Australians in the 1970s and ’80s. The cult originally was known as the Great White Brotherhood, and Hamilton-Byrne evolved from being a fashionable yoga teacher and spiritual guide to claiming she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. She died in 2019 at age 98 and, despite the devastation she caused, was not charged with a major crime.
The leader here is called Adrienne Beaufort, played by Miranda Otto with a blonde blow-wave and an air of self-assurance and inscrutability. She’s joined by a terrific cast including Kate Mulvany, Guy Pearce and Teresa Palmer, who evidently has had some earlier connection to the mind-controlling activities of the cult. The “clearing” refers to the initiation that Adrienne puts the children through as they reach adolescence, a cruel and frightening ritual where the initiate is dosed with LSD and left alone in a room.
Walker says the series will show how Adrienne became a powerful figure in her small community of followers, including her female assistants known as Aunties.
“Getting into the mindset of people in and around this thing – that’s the intrigue,” he says.
“No one wakes up and really believes they are a cult leader – ‘I’m going to go and be evil today.’ They are human beings who are deeply flawed. That’s what an actor like Miranda Otto gets to explore – there’s charisma, and there’s a hook, and the promise of something, whatever it might be.
“Then there are the private moments: how do you reconcile who you are as a person, and go about your day-to-day, when you have this whole other part of your life?”
Gracie Otto, who directed several episodes, had the unusual experience of directing her older sister Miranda as Adrienne. When they both realised they would be working together on The Clearing, Gracie sent Miranda a text to say, “I just want to check that you’re cool with me doing it?”
Gracie Otto says she loved working with such an experienced actor who happened to be her sister. “Miranda is an actor who really grounds herself when she comes on set,” she says. “We are both very organised, and obviously I’m behind the camera and she’s in front of the camera. But she knows her arc and she knows exactly where her character is, in a map in her head. She is very prepared.”
The younger Otto says she is fascinated with the history of cults, including the one founded by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh that became prominent in the ’80s. In episode five of The Clearing, which she directs, the story goes back to Adrienne’s childhood to give an insight into how she became the woman she is.
“She realised the way to get power,” Gracie Otto says. “She knows how to read people very well, and pry into their weaknesses. It’s interesting to see when she turns on them, like any abusive relationship people have been in.”
The series was created and written by Matt Cameron and Elise McCredie with co-writer Osamah Sami. Walker says they’ve used a non-linear structure in which the story leaps backwards and forwards in time, giving a deliberately blurred sense of reality.
“Sometimes it’s a misdirect, the way they have boldly scripted it all,” he says.
“They don’t wrap everything up in each episode. By the end of the season, everything pieces together, every little crumb you have been fed of this story along the way all comes together in the final couple of episodes. (The writers) were brave enough to say, ‘We’re not going to explain exactly how that fits in episode two; you have to wait and come back.’ ”
Palmer’s character, in particular, appears to be suffering the after-effects of trauma from her involvement with the cult. When a child goes missing in her community it triggers in Freya memories of the Kindred and makes her fear for the safety of her son. But, as Walker explains, what Freya experiences may or may not be objectively true.
“Freya as a character is an unreliable narrator,” he says. “She has been so affected by the trauma of her past that her perceived reality is not the reality that you and I would see if we were in the same room with her. She is living with this horrible sense of ‘I’m not sure what I’m really experiencing’.
“For a lot of people, the past does not live in the past, it lives with them very much in their present. That was the psychological investigation (of the series) – it became a storytelling device. Ultimately, as fractured as it is, for the characters and the audience and the way we structured it, it all comes together in a very satisfying way.”
Walker is a former actor turned director whose credits include Modern Family, Lambs of God, Young Rock, Ali’s Wedding and Jack Irish, the last on which he worked with writer Cameron. On The Clearing, he says, he did not want to over-rehearse the actors but instead allow their performances to bloom in “that raw magic of take one”.
“I want to keep that moment on set as fresh as possible,” he says. “However, with a project like this, it is great to sit down and have a chat (with the actors) and make sure that you are philosophically all aligned and that you are all making the same show.”
The Clearing is about a cult and its charismatic leader, but it is also a story of child abuse: children abducted, starved, drugged and brainwashed into believing Adrienne is their mother and saviour.
Walker says special care was taken of the child actors who appear in the series. “I was a child actor myself for 10 years on set, I know what that world is,” he says. “I loved it, it was made beautiful for me by the incredible people I worked with. As heavy as the material is (in The Clearing), it was drummed into the assistant directors, the chaperones, the parents working on set, that this is going to be an enjoyable experience, despite the fact we’re depicting what we’re depicting.”
He advised the children’s parents on the role they could play to support their children.
“I remember chatting to the parents: ‘They don’t need drama coaches, you don’t need to run lines with them, but if you want to be on set, you need to be there and give them a big hug, or distract them or talk to them … That’s your role, to normalise their world as much as possible, and I’ll shoot it as fast as humanly possible.’ I didn’t want to bring any of the heaviness of what we were depicting to their experience.”
He says The Clearing was his first experience of directing such a tense, chilling series and creating a disturbing atmosphere that pervades the show.
“I had not done anything in this heavy, psychological-thriller space,” he says. “I’m always thrilled to read anything that is challenging to me, emotionally or psychologically, or just knowing as a director that it’s going to take me into somewhere new and exciting – and this was one of those projects.”
The Clearing streams on Disney+ from May 24.
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