Fake review – Asher Keddie thrills in visceral drama about a romance scammer

It’s clear from early in this slow-building but eventually thrilling drama that something’s a little off about the man Asher Keddie’s food writer protagonist, Birdie Bell, has started dating. David Wenham’s Joe Burt is a smooth operator and wealthy grazier who humblebrags about big business deals and life on a picturesque farm away from the city’s hustle bustle. But he’s harbouring some kind of secret; we’re told as much in the first episode when we hear him reminisce via voiceover narration that “you were on to me from the start”.

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Vocalising what could have been inferred feels like the easy way out and detracts from a production – created by Anya Beyersdorf and directed by Emma Freeman, Jennifer Leacey and Taylor Ferguson – that avoids many of the easy routes.

The narration is my least favourite part of Fake, nudging focus away from Birdie – the heart and soul of the series – and front-loading very chewy lines. Joe, for instance, reminisces on how humans carry with them “history, experience, impression, delusion, belief, slung over our shoulders, burdening us, to one degree or another”. There’s a logic to this narration but it’s almost impossible to make a sentence like that sound natural – and the show doesn’t quite master the literary qualities it’s aspiring for, either.

Delivering that early, eerie insinuation about Joe nevertheless ensures that the viewer and Birdie are on the same page from the start, in that we know something’s a little suss about this guy – the $64,000 question of course being what. But from the perspective of wants and desires, ours and hers starkly contrast: while Birdie craves romance and stability, we wish the show to reveal Joe’s true colours, shaking up the drama and ending a prolonged period of anticipation.

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Fake (inspired by Stephanie Wood’s memoir of the same name ) is slow to establish a compelling groove, though the back half of the series delivers a payoff and then some: I was hooked by the end of episode four and completely swept away by the rest of the eight episodes.

You’ll find no spoilers here, suffice to say Wenham’s beaming face has been branded like a hot iron on to my psyche, a smile with strikingly different layers and connotations to the kind flashed in his most famous portrayal of a heart-throb – the beloved “Diver Dan” from the 90s TV drama SeaChange. In that show Sigrid Thornton’s protagonist left the city and moved to a coastal town, instigating the kind of Life 2.0 that would appeal to Birdie, who has had many unfulfilling relationships and is particularly open to fresh experiences after the death of her father, who shared a long-lasting relationship with her mother, Margeaux (Heather Mitchell, also exceptional).

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An important early scene depicting Birdie and Joe’s so-so first date in a bar is, itself, rather ho-hum; it’s as though Freeman (the set-up director, whose oeuvre includes Love Me , The Newsreader and Tidelands ) reasoned that an average time for the protagonist should mean an average time for the audience. Nothing about the scene pops and the actors give the impression of warming up. Birdie leaves the experience unimpressed but agrees to a second date, advice from Margeaux ringing in her ears about not being so fussy. Her relationship with Joe clicks into higher gear when he takes her to his isolated shack for a romantic getaway.

Keddie impresses from the start but it slowly becomes clear just how good this performance is: she does a brilliant job portraying a person who evolves from being indifferent about a potential relationship to completely immersed in it, desperately pained and filled with longing, wishing for things to be OK but knowing deep down she might be looking for love in the wrong place.

Birdie’s turbulent emotional journey spectacularly rises and swells in the last four episodes, the fifth one containing a prolonged (and rousingly directed) scene set in a car that is one of the best – and most visceral – moments in Australian television this year. A storm roiled inside me as I watched, pulse racing, heart in my chest, fighting off the inclination to yell, “No, don’t do it, don’t do it!” Keddie deserves every kind of award for this performance: she’s an exceptional actor and this is some of her finest work.

• Fake is streaming in Australia on Paramount+