Get Millie Black review: police story from the UK

Get Millie Black tells the story of a dedicated detective in search of missing children who is also searching for part of her past. After 18 years in England, she returns to her home in Kingston, Jamaica where she is involved in an international crime drama full of excitement and danger.

If you’ve seen the trailer for Get Millie Black it looks like all police action. That’s a lot of it, but there’s also an important storyline about how LGBTQ people are treated in Jamaica.

When Millie Black (Tamara Lawrance) was still living in London, her mother called her and told her that her younger brother was dead. When her mother died, Millie returned to Kingston and learned that her sibling was not dead. Her sibling is now Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen). Hibiscus is half owner of the mother’s estate and house, but she cannot stand to be in it. She was so mistreated and abused by their mother. She lives with a group of other transgender women in a location called The Gully. The Gully is basically a wide, open sewer draining into the ocean, but the trans women living there are mostly safe and have a strong community.

Millie works with a detective named Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) who is a closeted gay man. There’s drama in both Hibiscus and Curtis’s situations in addition to the police story. Gay men and trans people are attacked, beaten, and even killed in Jamaica.

Millie gets a case about a missing 16 year old girl named Janet (Shernet Swearine). The deeper she digs into the girl’s disappearance, the more she realizes she’s found a cesspool of evil with an even greater stench than The Gully.

Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie) from the London Metropolitan Police is in Jamaica. He’s looking for an informant named Freddie (Peter John Thwaites) who is wanted to testify in England. Millie and Luke are forced to work together. She doesn’t trust him (or some of her fellow officers on the local force) and quickly begins to investigate his background while she’s hunting for the missing girl.

There are other missing children, including a very young boy named Romeo. Millie begins to suspect trafficking as the story gets more layered and dangerous.

Millie is the type of cop who will use anyone to get what she’s after. She calls on her old partner back in England, Meera (Anjli Mohindra), for intel. She takes advantage of friendships and relationships as she digs deeper into the story. She puts people in danger because she doesn’t always follow protocol or orders.

There are five episodes in the series. Each has a different narrator, including Curtis in one and Janet in another. These people have a different perspective on Millie Black’s mission to rescue the missing children, her dedication to her job, and her attitude toward relationships. It gave what was essentially a police procedural a slightly different tone, which is always a good thing in a story like so many others before it.

Because many of the characters in Jamaica spoke patois, subtitles were included throughout. Four of the five episodes were directed by women: Tanya Hamilton and Annetta Laufer. The series is an HBO original streaming on Max.