# The Clearing (2023)

> A woman haunted by her traumatic childhood is forced to confront her past when a local girl goes missing.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/125403

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 8
- Episode runtime: 49 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: drama, thriller
- Created by: Matt Cameron, Elise McCredie
- Network: Disney+
- Cast: Teresa Palmer, Miranda Otto, Guy Pearce, Cassie Robb, Anna Lise Phillips, Kate Mulvany, Erroll Shand, Hazem Shammas
- TMDB rating: 6.3/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20259432/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: layered
- Violence: moderate
- Tone: brooding, tense, melancholic, claustrophobic

## What critics say

Audience response to this Australian miniseries is mixed, with viewers praising its performances and atmosphere while finding its thriller mechanics and reveals uneven.

## Synopsis

The Clearing (2023) is an Australian psychological thriller limited series created by Matt Cameron and Elise McCredie and released on Disney+. Teresa Palmer plays Freya Heywood, a woman whose own traumatic childhood resurfaces when a local girl goes missing in a close-knit town. Her investigation pulls her toward the people who share that buried history, including Miranda Otto as Adrienne Beaufort and Guy Pearce as Dr. Bryce Latham, whose connections to the past grow harder to ignore as the search continues. The engine of the story is the tension between a community that wants to move on and a protagonist who cannot stop digging, with each episode layering suspicion, memory and small revelations across a single eight-episode run of roughly forty-nine minutes. Set in contemporary Australia, the series builds a claustrophobic atmosphere of rural secrecy, rain-washed landscapes and quiet domestic unease. Its tone is brooding, tense and emotionally raw, closer to the slow dread of Top of the Lake than to a conventional procedural. Viewers who enjoy patient character-driven mysteries with a psychological core will find much to admire in its restrained, morally complicated portrait of a community and the woman at its centre.

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