Another year, another Harlan Coben adaptation arrives on Netflix with the inevitability of a New Year hangover. Run Away continues the streamer’s wildly successful commitment to transforming the thriller writer’s pulpy page-turners into glossy dramas that pile on the implausibilities with abandon. From Fool Me Once’s nanny-cam resurrections to Missing You’s improbable dating-app plot, the storylines are ludicrously daft, stuffed with more red herrings than a Nordic fish market.
But the real draw has always been the property porn, right? How can they all afford those kitchens? Those Shaker-style units? This time, James Nesbitt plays Simon, a father searching for his runaway daughter Paige (Ellie de Lange) in London’s grimmest corners. His family may be falling apart, but the kitchen remains impeccable: a cavernous open-plan, Farrow & Ball marvel that suggests whatever crisis he’s facing, it’s not negative equity.
As with the other Coben adaptations, Run Away is junk-food TV: built for purpose, and satisfying in a quick-fix kind of way. Netflix has really mastered a particular alchemy here: a surefire formula that relies on lurching from one twist to the next, before landing a final gut-punch so seismic that you’re left completely disoriented.
Simon’s search for Paige – drug-ravaged and vulnerable when he spots her busking in a park – quickly spirals into something far darker. There’s a dead boyfriend, sinister religious zealots running a rural, Manson-style cult, and a conspiracy that reaches closer to home than Simon could imagine. His wife Ingrid spends much of the series in a coma, although, in the moments when her character is actually conscious, Minnie Driver imbues her with a steely resolve.
Anchoring it all is Nesbitt. As the dogged, deceptively hard Simon, he adds a lacquer of gravitas to this slick operation. Despair haunts his face throughout, but, this being Coben, there are also traces of pitch-black humour as the bodies pile up. And they really do, in scenes that are often visceral and pretty grisly.
Much of that carnage comes courtesy of Ash and Dee Dee, a pair of assassins played with pleasingly odd energy by Jon Pointing and Maeve Courtier-Lilley. Their rapport reaches crackling point as they hunt down their targets. The two strike an intriguing balance: threatening yet strangely sympathetic, with flashes of sadness beneath the macabre violence. They’re the series’ secret weapon, both mercurial and eerily funny.
Less successful is Alfred Enoch as Detective Sergeant Isaac Fagbenle. His is a turn that lacks any shading whatsoever. It’s all blunt-force conviction when what the role needs is ambiguity. That some of his dialogue is dire doesn’t help.
The supporting cast, including Ruth Jones as a private investigator, do battle with underwritten roles; there are lazy shortcuts to characterisation, with several players reduced to little more than narrative cogs. But as disposable entertainment goes, Run Away is effective hokum. And sometimes, particularly on New Year’s Day, that’s precisely what the patient requires.
