User Reviews

I don't normally watch ITV dramas but this ones trailer appealed to me and so I decided to give this one a chance and I'm glad I did. The whole film kept me completely glued to the TV. Everything was so intense and suspenseful.

The young actress, Hannah Lochner who played Heather was excellent; she was creepy, disturbing, a sympathetic brat, manipulative but gave a really charismatic performance. She stole the show. She tackled all her scenes (and some were quite harsh) with ease and showed talent way beyond her years. One scene in particular when she is watching her mother get brutally murdered whilst hiding in the cupboard is so moving. She is definitely a star in the making.

The story itself was harrowing, a woman, Tess (unable to have children and unable to adopt in the UK after an attempted suicide) adopts two girls. The younger one, Grace quickly becomes a member of the family but the elder girl, Heather is a traumatised young child and Tess soon believes she is hiding a dark secret. The story is gripping and watch it just for Lochner's performance.

Tess and Alfie Palmer are so desperate to have children that they illegally adopt two girls who have already been shuttled around to multiple families. The daughters are taken from Alberta, Canada to London, where they start their new family. Then, the nightmare begins.

Young Heather cannot accept Tess as her mother, and there is even an ugly scene where it appears that Heather may have tried to push Tess into an oncoming subway train. As a trained psychoanalyst, Tess makes the decision to take Heather back to Alberta where she will revisit the crime scene where her mother was brutally killed.

There were too many premises in this film that seemed utterly preposterous. If Heather genuinely posed a threat to Tess, how could she conceivably take her back to scene of the kid's mother's brutal murder? And what would be the purpose of this experience if the child had actually killed her mother, as Tess suspects? This kind of shock therapy was more like armchair psychology than healthy clinical practice.

The strength of the film was the earnest acting ensemble. The relationship between Tess and Heather evolved in an eerie, disturbing way. There was also quite an imaginative plot twist in the closing sequence when the mother and daughter make a shocking discovery at the place in Alberta where you can find the best darned lemonade in four counties.