Cloudstreet: UK reviews

Showtime’s critically-acclaimed drama Cloudstreet began its UK run on Sky Atlantic on the weekend.

Here’s what some of the critics had to say:

The Guardian:
Cloudstreet opens with a beautiful tumbling montage of memories – some of them maybe yet to come – before it settles on a laughing family on a seaside fishing trip. They are the Lambs. Then what we will come to know as “the shifty shadow” of fate moves over them and we are suddenly in the middle of a drowning scene so harrowing you don’t even have the space to wonder how it was you came to care about them so much, so quickly……Over the next two episodes, the house will disgorge its own secrets, which encompass the treatment of the children who would come to be called the lost generation and, from beginning to end, it is just wonderful. Beautiful to look at, stuffed with pitch-perfect performances, dryly and truly funny, warm, real, heartbreaking and altogether masterly. A fair dinkum miracle, you might say.

RadioTimes:
Some horrible things happen in the opening minutes of this 1940s-set Australian drama: a young boy suffers brain damage after a near-fatal drowning and a man who relies on his hands for his work gets his fingers sliced off. By the time a religious matriarch exclaims, “First the bank and now this”, you’ll be dreading finding out what “this” actually is. But tragedy soon gives way to melodrama as two separate clans (the Pickles and the Lambs) converge on a vast house in suburban Perth after fleeing their rural pasts. This dramatisation of Tim Winton’s bestseller is lush but languorous, but some understated performances (in particular from The Slap’s Essie Davis) give it the sheen of quality.

TimeOut London:
As a sell, ‘“The Waltons”, with some weird shit’ may not work for some, but this Aussie period drama – adapted from Tim Winton’s award-winning novel about two families forced to share a home together in 1940s Perth – is a grower. Its bucolic atmosphere threaded with dark discordant notes that create something out of the ordinary. After last week’s harrowing events for the raucous Lamb family and the troubled Pickles, there’s an inevitable second-episode settling down for both the story and characters, but we’re soon back to the hardship and dashed hopes, punctuated with moments of pure joy and sheer oddness – talking pigs and a money-shitting parrot, for example, not to mention some unexpected responses to the cataclysmic end of WWII.