After the Party review – hands down the best acting on TV all year

11/20/2024 05:00 PM

Peter Mullan is perfectly cast and Robyn Malcolm delivers the performance of 2024 in this dark, provocative drama about a woman who accuses her husband of a sex act with a minor

It's a bravura performance from the very beginning, when Robyn Malcolm as middle-aged teacher Penny Wilding delivers an impromptu lecture – warm, wise, compassionate and shorn of euphemisms – to her students after one is caught watching pornography on his phone. There are protocols for this sort of thing, her headteacher has informed her, but it's quicker and more effective to do it her way.

After the Party explores what happens when an unstoppable force meets an amorphous, ungraspable object. Five years ago, Penny witnessed – or believes she witnessed – her husband Phil (Peter Mullan) engaging in a sex crime at his birthday party with a drunken underage friend of their daughter, Grace (Tara Canton), and confronted him furiously in front of their guests. As the scene unfolds in flashbacks from different points of view over six episodes, we see Phil reacting with the outraged innocence of – well, the innocent. Or is it the well-honed performance of a practised predator? Mullan, with his ability to suggest inescapable menace lurking beneath everyman bonhomie, is perfect casting.