Little Disasters
There’s a finely calibrated tension humming beneath the surface of Little Disasters, the Paramount+ drama adapted from Sarah Vaughan’s best-selling novel. What begins as a psychological thriller slowly morphs into something murkier, shifting focus from uncovering what happened to examining why we chose to look the other way – especially when it’s a friend on the other side.
Set across the gardens of a Provence villa, the leafy suburbs of London, and the sterile, mint-green interiors of NHS hospital wards, Little Disasters is visually meticulous. The cinematography draws deliberate contrasts – idyllic warmth against clinical coldness – echoing the trajectories of its four central characters: Jess (Diane Kruger), Liz (Jo Joyner), Charlotte (Shelley Conn) and Mel (Emily Taaffe).
These women, all first-time mothers who met in an antenatal class, find their long-standing friendship thrown into disarray when Jess arrives at A&E with her infant daughter and an unexplained head injury. Liz, the paediatrician on duty and once Jess’s closest confidante, is forced to make a harrowing call. From there, the drama unfolds not as a procedural but as a multifaceted study of guilt, social expectation, and the hidden hierarchies of modern motherhood.
Performances are strong throughout, with Conn’s Charlotte – a high-achieving lawyer simmering with dissatisfaction over her seemingly perfect life – standing out. The dynamic among the four is convincingly tangled, marked by deep-seated rivalries, silent scorekeeping, and glances revealing more than any line ever could.
Less effective are the faux-interview segments in which the women speak directly to the camera. While they offer some additional perspective, these segments ultimately weaken the series’ suspense, steering it more toward confessional drama than the psychological thriller it aims to be. These asides are informative and occasionally moving, but they undercut the show’s carefully maintained ambiguity. Little Disasters is at its most powerful when it trusts viewers to read between the lines.
Still, Little Disasters remains absorbing and well-paced, with its slow-burn twists and refusal to deal in moral absolutes. It’s a drama more interested in understanding than judgment – how even close friends can become strangers in a crisis, and how motherhood, far from being the great unifier, can just as easily be the great divider.
Christina Yang
Little Disasters is released on Paramount+ on 22nd May 2025.
Watch the trailer for Little Disasters here:
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