Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Boy Swallows Universe’ On Netflix, A Coming Of Age Story About A Kid With A Mute Brother, An Addicted Mom And A Drug-Dealing Stepdad

Netflix’s adaptation of Trent Dalton’s 2018 novel Boy Swallows Universe somehow manages to take some pretty dark material and make it hopeful. It’s a coming-of-age story that takes place in Brisbane’s criminal underground, but isn’t really about crime. How were they able to pull this off?

BOY SWALLOWS UNIVERSE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A darkened suburban neighborhood. “Darra, Brisbane, 1985.”

The Gist: Inside the house, a bunch of thugs is holding a family of four hostage; one puts a knife on the table in front of 13-year-old Eli Bell (Felix Cameron). Everyone screams as Eli’s stepfather Lyle Orlik (Travis Fimmel) is yanked out of the house by the thugs, and loaded into the trunk of a car. When the car stops, a hole is drilled in the trunk and it’s loaded with gas to knock Lyle out.

Six weeks earlier, we see Eli and his older brother Gus (Lee Tiger Halley) at home with their mother Frankie (Phoebe Tonkin) and her boyfriend Lyle, who is more or less the boys’ stepfather. Gus is a smart kid and creative kid who doesn’t speak; he communicates by writing sentences in the air, like “your end is a dead blue wren,” which only make sense later on.

A buddy of Eli’s is Slim Halliday (Bryan Brown), who just got out of prison after a long stretch on a murder conviction. He’s more or less the boys’ babysitter, and he takes Eli for a driving lesson. During the lesson, as Eli dodges swerving cars that curse him out, he talks to Slim about the convict he’s a pen pal with, and asks Slim how he did his 25 year stretch. Slim said he kept busy by doing things like collecting cockroach poop and playing himself in chess.

When Eli finds out that Slim is coming to watch him and Gus the next night, he suspects that Lyle is dealing again, and has again sucked Frankie into that world. He thinks back to when Lyle left the last time, leaving Frankie addicted and helpless. When he came back, he locked Frankie in an extra room in an attempt to force her to detox; Eli still remembers his mother screaming to him for help.

Eli’s letters to the convict come into play when his bullying classmate Darren Dang (Zachary Wan) has Eli hold a rat so he can slice it with a new samurai sword while blindfolded. Eli is caught by the assistant principal, and takes a caning instead of ratting out Darren, keeping in mind the inmate code of keeping your mouth shut.

When Eli and Gus get back to the house, Gus gets a key and goes into the extra room, that Lyle has banned them from; Gus introduces Eli to a tunnel that Lyle has dug, where there’s a red phone. Somehow the phone rings and the person on the other end knows Eli’s name. But when Lyle finds them, they go through the tunnel and end up on the business end of the outhouse in the yard.

But Eli is still suspicious, so he follows Lyle to the house of the aforementioned Darren; his mother Bich (HaiHa Le) is a notorious “businesswoman” in town, and it seems that Lyle is selling lots of heroin for her. But when Bich meets Eli, she’s impressed with the boy and thinks he can do some work for her.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe feels a bit like a very dark take on The Wonder Years, with some non-monster-related elements of Stranger Things mixed in.

Our Take: Through the first episode of Boy Swallows Universe, we couldn’t help but feel that the show doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of events that shows how Eli and his family manage to find some happiness in what is a decidedly unconventional existence. John Collee wrote the adaptation along with Dalton, and the two make sure to not make Eli’s childhood into some bleak slog. In fact, both he and Gus seem to take most of the strange goings-on around them in stride, except for when it comes to their mother’s wellbeing.

The flashback scenes where Frankie is locked into the extra room in Lyle’s effort for her to get clean are really harrowing to watch and listen to, but even then they’re done with a purpose. Lyle wants to get Frankie clean — given he’s likely the one who got her using, that makes sense — and doing it in this brute force way was the only way he really knew how.

That’s one of the things that struck us about this show: Even with all the darkness, there’s no bleakness. There’s no despair. Eli doesn’t sit and feel sorry for himself; between lusting after a local newswoman named Caitlyn Spies (Sophie Wilde) and fighting off bullies like Darren, Eli is more determined to get Lyle — whom he actually loves like a father — to stop doing what he’s doing. Lyle, on the other hand, feels that this is the only way he can get the family a better life.

What we’re going to see along the way is Eli getting in touch with his father Robert (Simon Baker) and learning Lyle’s business, which includes meeting his charismatic boss Tytus Broz (Anthony LaPaglia). In other words, there are going to be characters he meets along the way, and at some point we’re going to return to when Lyle was thrown in that trunk; dollars to donuts Lyle and Gus will likely be heavily involved in looking for him.

This is certainly one of those shows that doesn’t necessarily need an overarching plot, a conflict that needs to be resolved. Because of the interesting characters we meet, the fact that the main characters are strong enough to navigate some pretty traumatic circumstances, and the idea that Eli is going to find himself in Brisbane’s criminal community and somehow come out of it not completely corrupted, is enough to keep us watching.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As Eli sleeps after his night following Lyle around, a motorcycle pulls up in front of the house. Then, the red phone in the underground bunker rings.

Sleeper Star: Lee Tiger Halley shines as Gus. As we see in a scene where he talks to a guidance counselor, the trauma he’s suffered in life has led him to the point where he doesn’t speak. Halley does a great job of showing that Gus gets by just fine without speaking, but there’s something in his normally-placid expression that makes us think he’s burying something pretty bad in his psyche.

Most Pilot-y Line: The scenes with Bryan Brown’s Slim prompted us to turn on the subtitles. We get it; some regional accents in Australia are harder to understand than others. But, lord, it sounded like he was speaking some other language.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Somehow, Boy Swallows Universe pulls off a pretty dark coming-of-age story without being depressing or hopeless, thanks to some deft writing and fantastic performances by the cast.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.