It’s rare to see a foreign mystery thriller go all the way up the Netflix top 10 list, but Dear Child hung out at #2 for a while and even topped the list for a day or so. The premise sounded intriguing, so I figured I would watch the six episode miniseries to see what it was all about.
The problem with Dear Child is that it does start off as a somewhat intriguing mystery, but that fades quickly. A woman escapes captivity, appearing to be a girl who went missing 13 years earlier. But she’s not that girl, though she’s accompanied by a girl who says she’s her daughter, but acts bizarre and raises more questions than answers.
The mysteriousness of all this, however, only really lasts half the series. By the time you get to the last three episodes, you sort of understand everything that’s happening here, and you’ve definitely seen bits and pieces of it across other shows like this before. I’m not sure its bringing anything particularly new to the table.
To talk about it further, I’m going to have to go into spoiler territory, but since I don’t really recommend watching it, you can read on if you want.
Pretty quickly, once you realize that Jasime is not Lena, and her captor merely makes her pretend to be Lena in captivity, raising Lena’s actual children, you get what happened. Clearly, this guy kidnapped Lena, she died, and now he’s replaced her. But he’s replaced her many times, with other dead women out in the woods with dyed hair and prim clothes in order to replicate Lena’s look.
There are weird red herrings planted in here, like a brief moment where you suspect Lena’s father of something because he’s recognized by his granddaughter. But it turns out that’s just because she’d seen a drawing of him. Or you learn that the two captive children have different fathers, but that’s just because Lena was pregnant when she first arrived by an ex-boyfriend, who has nothing to do with any of this.
The mysteries seem pretty plain. Outside of the “Lena replacement” thing, it was clear from pretty much the first episode that the dead man in the locked room was not the actual bad guy, given that his face is hidden and someone else is lurking, spying on people. Clearly it was a body of someone else put there as a decoy (it was).
It is also not that shocking that the young girl was sort of in on the whole release and re-abduction bit, given that early on she gives her mother a shard of broken glass and reminds her that the father is “still with her.” Clearly she’s been brainwashed into going along with all this, so her “serving” the still-alive father was also not a shock.
Finally, in the end, we learn that the guy was doing all this because of you guessed it, his mother. Turns out his mother looked like Lena, so after a chance encounter he goes back and abducts her, and begins with Oedipal cycle of trying to father children with these women who are roleplaying his own mother. Weird, but it feels like we’ve seen variants of the whole “he was doing it because of his mother” thing a million times, all the way back to Psycho. But it has to be well done, and I don’t think this is.
It’s fine, I guess I just don’t think it’s worth the six hours, given how many of its mysteries seem pretty spelled-out, and the end being a forgone conclusion. I’ve seen worse thrillers, but I feel like there are better things you could be catching up on instead.
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