Totally Completely Fine, outstanding dark comedy from Australia

Totally Completely Fine brings Australian dark comedy to a series about a family struggling with grief. It’s an excellent series with outstanding writing and beautiful performances from a big ensemble cast.

Three grown siblings are at the center of Totally Completely Fine. They lost their parents years ago in a car accident. Their grandfather raised them. His death brings them and all their unresolved pain and trauma together again to set off the drama and spiraling dysfunction of another loss.

Vivian (Thomasin McKenzie) inherits her grandfather’s house. She’s the centerpiece in the family drama because she is the biggest f*ck up among the three. The first day she’s in the house, which is in a neighborhood perched high on a sheer cliff above the sea, she stops Amy (Contessa Treffone) from leaping to her death while Amy is still wearing her wedding dress.

Amy moves in with Vivian, uninvited. She wears Vivian’s grandfather’s clothes and finishes the pergola he was working on outside. Vivian keeps asking her to leave, but she just hangs around. Amy becomes essential in helping Vivian carry on her grandfather’s work saving people from suicide at the cliff’s edge in the backyard.

Vivian’s brother Hendrix (Brandon McClellan) didn’t get anything of value from his grandfather’s will. He has a wife (Mia Morrissey) and twin two-year old girls. The marriage is not going well.

Vivian’s brother John (Rowan Witt) inherited a chair. That’s it. A chair. He harbors so much anger at Vivian he can barely speak. He’s a gay man with a real hunk of a partner, Alejandro (Édgar Vittorino), and a tendency to panic attacks.

The siblings are the heart of the story, each dealing with the grieving process in very different ways. The series is actually a powerful, emotional drama with mostly visual humor to lighten things up. Hendrix wears funny hats, one episode has everyone dressed up as famous women, Amy creates a hilarious looking garden scene in the pergola. But underneath it all is unresolved grief and the looming problem of suicide and desperate people longing for an end to the pain.

George (James Sweeny), the man Amy left at the altar, is good in a subtly menacing way. The neighbor Dane (Devon Terrell) is a psychologist with psychological problems. The newspaper carrier Louis (Max Crean) wants to live in the 1950s. Beatrice (Deborah Kennedy) shows up at the house on Wednesdays to smoke grandfather’s weed.

I’ve mentioned a lot of characters, but they are all well done and contribute in some way to the healing and resolution that slowly builds through the six episodes of the series. The actors playing the siblings, particularly Thomasin McKenzie, are outstanding.

Five of the six episodes in Totally Completely Fine were directed by Lucy Gaffy. I thought she did a masterful job with the frequent flashbacks in Vivian’s PTSD as well as small moments removed from the action. The Australian producers made the series for Sundance Now, and you can also see it on AMC, AMC+ or buy it from Prime Video. If you have a way to catch it in any of those places, it is definitely worth seeing. Here’s a look at the trailer.