Stateless review – harrowing, hypnotic refugee drama

There is a running joke in Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt about Cate Blanchett. “Is she great?” characters wonder, “or is she just tall?”

It works only because, of course, she is great (and tall). And she is great once again in Netflix’s six-part drama Stateless – in the part she plays (Pat Masters, half of a husband-and-wife team who lead a cultish self-help group) and in her role as the co-creator and driving force behind this clever, harrowing and compelling series.

Stateless follows four main characters, tracing their disparate routes – sometimes in flashback form – into the Australian detention centre for illegal immigrants in which all are incarcerated or employed.

Yvonne Strahovski plays Sofie Werner, an Australian citizen and cabin attendant whose passport and bank cards are taken away by her concerned parents after she becomes involved in the group led by Pat and her charismatic husband, Gordon (Dominic West, modulating perfectly from almost cartoonish happy-clapper to sinuous threat). After he does to her what charismatic cult leaders tend to do to vulnerable young women in their thrall, and then humiliates her publicly when she looks like exposing him, Sofie flees and ends up in the centre posing as a German, Eva, who has overstayed her visa and wants to be deported to her home country.

Sofie’s storyline is based on the case of Cornelia Rau, a mentally ill German woman and Australian permanent resident who 15 years ago was discovered in a detention centre, having been held there unlawfully for 10 months. An inquiry rapidly expanded to cover more than 200 other cases of unlawful detention by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs. On the basis of this drama, the news and the general trajectory of the world, things have not improved significantly since.

Across the other side of the centre, in the men’s compound, is Ameer (Fayssal Bazzi), whose storyline is emblematic of hundreds of thousands in real life. When we first meet him and his beloved family, they have made their way from Afghanistan to the Indonesian coast via Pakistan. There they are betrayed by the men supposed to provide them with a boat to Australia and become separated during a second attempt to cross.

Although he stands for many, Ameer and his tale are particularised and made horribly real. His disorientation is different from Sofie’s, his options are different and his order of suffering when he is reunited with one of his daughters is different again.

Rounding out the main quartet are Clare Kowitz (Asher Keddie) and Cam Sandford (Jai Courtney). The former is the centre’s new administrator, brought in to try to keep the place – and the Tamil refugees protesting on its rooftop – out of the news. The latter is a family man of solid Australian stock, who is persuaded to sign up as an officer at the centre by his friends who are earning good money there. “Blood money,” according to his activist neighbour, but Cam is sure that things can’t be too bad in there – and that he can resist any temptations offered.

If Sofie is the average (non-refugee) viewer’s point of imaginative entry and Ameer is the humanisation of headlines we know, Cam is the embodiment of the truth that nobody is immune to brutality. It is not just how we treat the most vulnerable in society, but how we let them be treated that amounts to a stain on all our souls.

The six episodes weave the stories together with a sure hand and a careful eye, avoiding all sorts of common traps. The white woman’s story never takes over (aided by Strahovski’s understated, but note-perfect, performance as a woman disintegrating from the inside out) and Ameer’s never becomes generic. It does not become about one man’s guilt, but interrogates a system that relies on complicity, blind eyes and a lack of political will to change it.

Those in charge are not evil but harried, cogs in a machine into which their superiors fling more and more shit. It is leavened by humour (at one point, the Tamil interpreter brought in to broker an agreement between the protesters and Kowitz tells her delightedly about all the friends and family they have in common back home) without losing its seriousness of intent or purpose. Which is, of course, to ask: what would you do, in this or that character’s situation. And what are you doing now?