‘Playing Gracie Darling’ Review: A Familiar Blend of Teen Mystery and Supernatural Horror

This Australian series blends two formats that have become especially fashionable in recent years: police procedurals about missing or mysteriously dead teenage girls, and horror stories built around dangerous, macabre party games. The first category now fills streaming platforms with tales of troubled teens who vanish while someone tries to piece together what happened. The second has produced a wave of horror films about kids dabbling in ouija-style games without the slightest clue of the consequences that await them.

The most successful of the latter, recently, is Talk to Me, directed by Australia’s Philippou brothers. And it’s precisely from that same country that Playing Gracie Darling emerges—a series that starts with a setup not unlike that film but pivots into a more traditional investigative mystery. The show constantly jumps back and forth between 1997 and the present day. The event that haunts everything to come occurs in those late-’90s scenes: four friends—Joni, Gracie, Anita, and Jay—are playing a classic ouija-type game in a cabin when the “spirit” they contact, calling itself Levi, seems to seize control. Three of them manage to escape, but Gracie Darling (Kristina Bogic) remains inside, caught in a kind of trance—and then simply disappears.

The series pivots around that moment, showing what the characters were dealing with before and after the incident, but the other narrative thread unfolds in 2024. Adult Joni (Morgana O’Reilly, with Eloise Rothfield playing her younger self) now works in a psychiatric hospital. She learns that Frankie Darling, Gracie’s niece, has also gone missing. Not only are the circumstances eerily similar, but Frankie vanished while playing a game called “Gracie Darling”—a half-joking, half-morbid riff on the disappearance that marked the town’s past. And once again, the same thing happens. That’s what sends Joni back home, teaming up with her old friend Jay—now a police officer played by Rudi Dharmalingam—to figure out what really happened. Their search drives the constant flashbacks that structure what can be, at times, a rather tangled narrative.

The show, written by Miranda Nation, layers in small-town tensions, environmental subplots, lingering resentments, and Joni’s own guilt—her belief that she failed to save her friend. It also taps into the usual ’90s teenage dramas, which, with slight variations, mirror the anxieties of present-day teens. The two timelines echo each other: not only have the Darlings lost two girls, but the children of the original group are now playing the same dangerous game. Worse still, “playing Gracie Darling” becomes something of a trend, turning into an epidemic of at-risk adolescents.

The series doesn’t really dig deep into any of its ideas—if anything, it barely tries. The supernatural angle is chaotic and inconsistent, and the investigation isn’t much tighter. What does work are the flashbacks, which continually pull Joni into memories that feel, at least through the first three episodes (the season has six), like the true core of the story. The show occasionally recalls Yellowjackets—not only in its split-timeline structure and its mostly female ensemble, but because the lead actress bears more than a passing resemblance to Melanie Lynskey.

Playing Gracie Darling is one of those shows where everyone seems linked to everyone else, everyone carries some old wound, and everyone looks a bit suspicious. Beyond that, there isn’t much new to chew on. It’s a middle-of-the-pack series trying to hitch a ride on the trend of mixing crime drama and horror tropes to tell stories about messy families and troubled teenagers who don’t realize how deep they’re getting until it’s too late.