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When she suffers a breakdown, they cast her out of their ranks, the event that precipitates her confused and aimless wanderings around Australia. She’s soon swept up in a New Age-y cult run by a creepy couple, Gordon and Pat Masters (Dominic West, tapping a predatory vein, and Cate Blanchett, being Cate Blanchett), who swiftly sniff out Sofie’s vulnerabilities and manipulate her. It’s pretty average suburban-malaise stuff - but Sofie is so suffocated by the environment she literally crawls out a bathroom window and runs away. Her sister, Margot, meanwhile, is the child who’s done it right: successful marriage, kids. Her father is gentler but kowtows to his wife at every turn. Her stern mother is dismissive of tales from Sofie’s travels, focused instead on setting her up with a boring local businessman they’ve invited to dinner. Escape is her lifeblood, and we quickly learn why, when she returns to her parents’ house for Christmas. She works as a flight attendant, thrilled by the adventures the job offers. When we meet her, Sofie is pulled-together and polished, if fraying a touch at the edges.

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The ironic effect of the show’s investment in Sofie is that her story feels less and less valuable as the series goes on. They are the narrative focus, sucking up all the series’ energy, while the refugees exist mostly for atmosphere, there to be pitied but not fully represented or truly understood - at least not as deeply as Sofie is. Instead of elevating these immigrant stories, the show diminishes them, by heaping attention on Sofie, as well as the white bureaucrats and guards who work at the detention center. Sofie and her counterparts - unlawful non-citizens or “UNCs,” in the jargon of the detention center guards and brass - have suffered the same fate, but their journeys, other than bringing them to the same physical place, don’t really intersect in meaningful ways. Sofie’s plight is meant to highlight theirs, as, in real life, the shocking reveal that one of Australia’s own - that is, a young white woman from a good family - was snagged in the gears of governmental failure prompted investigations into all manner of abuses and ills in the nation’s immigration system.īut, in Stateless, the juxtaposition only underscores a gross imbalance in storytelling. The series sets her story against the bleak backdrop of a detention center teeming with refugees and political asylum-seekers.

Stateless, an Aussie import from creators Cate Blanchett, Tony Ayers, and Elise McCredie, which arrived to Netflix last week, does just that, tracing a similar arc for a character named Sofie Werner (Yvonne Strahovski).

It’s a startling and sad story, and it’s not hard to see why someone would want to dramatize it for television. The byzantine halls and trap doors of bureaucracy kept her confined in quasi-prison, unbeknownst to her family, for 10 months. Mentally ill and traumatized after time spent in a cult, Rau had claimed to be a German citizen, though she possessed no paperwork that confirmed her identity. In 2004, an Australian citizen named Cornelia Rau was wrongly imprisoned in an immigrant detention camp in her home country.

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