#‘The Last Thing He Told Me’ Review: Jennifer Garner Stars in a Blandly Watchable Apple TV+ Mystery

Early in their courtship, Hannah (Jennifer Garner) shows Owen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) around her woodturning shop. “Your first lesson is that a good piece of wood always has one thing, one quality, that defines it,” she says, standing by a shelf full of assorted blocks waiting to be transformed into delicate bowls or urns. He likes the idea, and takes it a step further. “You could probably say the same thing about most people,” he muses. “At the end of the day, one thing defines them.”

Whether that’s true of actual people is a question for philosophers or psychologists to sort out. It’s certainly true of these two, though, and of nearly everyone else in Apple TV+’s The Last Thing He Told Me. In certain lights, their singleness of purpose looks refreshing, even inspiring; it turns what could have been a straightforward tale of suspense into an unexpectedly tender celebration of love. But it also flattens the story until all that’s left is a shiny, glossy surface.

Faithfully adapted by Laura Dave and Josh Singer from Dave’s own bestselling novel, The Last Thing He Told Me begins with an irresistible mystery. On a day that starts out seeming like any other, Owen disappears, leaving no clues as to where he’s gone and only a few hints about what’s to come: a pair of cryptic notes to Hannah, now his wife of one year, and Bailey (Angourie Rice), his teenage daughter from a previous marriage, along with a fat bag of cash. By all appearances, he’s on the run from a federal investigation into an Enron-level fraud orchestrated by the tech firm he works for — and yet Bailey and Hannah cannot shake the suspicion that there’s more to his flight than meets the eye.

This being a miniseries with seven hour-long episodes to fill, of course they’re right. The deeper they dig into who Owen really was and what he was really up to, the less the pieces seem to add up. The Last Thing He Told Me hums along at a steady pace, with twists that drop at regular intervals and reveals that dial up the craziness one notch at a time. If some of the later developments strain credulity (an awful lot of the plot hinges on the ability of a very small child to retain detailed memories), we’re at least primed to expect the unexpected by the time they come along. The drama may never get fully engrossing, but it’s perfectly watchable throughout — especially since much of the early action unfolds in a Sausalito floating home so pristine and pretty, Hannah and Bailey might as well be freaking out from within an Architectural Digest home tour.

Under this tasteful gloss, however, is a pervasive sense of blandness — in the characters, their relationships and even, somehow, in the story’s unpredictable turns. Owen is depicted as an implausible ideal of a husband and father, whose only faults might be being too pained by the loss of Bailey’s late mother to talk about her much and too protective of his daughter to let her vacation with her boyfriend (John Harlan Kim) and his family. Hannah is almost as perfect, a doting wife and stepmother who showers Bailey with unconditional care and endless offers of grilled cheese sandwiches — even when Bailey rejects her every overture, because her defining quality is a stereotypical adolescent surliness.

The central performances do add a bit of depth to these one-dimensional characters. Garner cuts Hannah’s sweetness with just enough steel to make her a convincing mama bear, and not simply a scared wife. Meanwhile, Rice imbues Hannah’s teen angst with enough vulnerability that she becomes a character we feel for, rather than one we resent. (She also gets some of the show’s snappier lines. When Owen gently pleads with her to “try harder” with Hannah, Bailey shrugs back, “You’re always telling me, if you don’t have anything nice to say …”) As The Last Thing He Told Me shifts its focus from Owen’s whereabouts to the growing bond between his wife and daughter, it’s careful to inch them closer by degrees and avoid either unnecessary conflict or unearned sentimentality.

The problem is that it also largely avoids messiness, ambivalence and nuance, which makes the all-important familial dynamics feel more theoretical than lived-in. It does not help that Owen’s disappearance occurs so early in the series, giving us precious little time to get to know who these people are before they’re thrown into extreme circumstances. While The Last Thing He Told Me does step back into the days and years before Owen’s disappearance — at one point traveling so far into the past that Coster-Waldau’s eerily unlined face becomes a case study in the limits of anti-aging CG — they’re mostly cast in the golden glow of nostalgia, and made even hazier by the uncertainty of the present.

For Owen’s part, the answer he eventually settles on when Hannah asks him the one thing that defines him is his love for Bailey: “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my daughter,” his voice shifting from flirty to serious. It’s that parental love, pure and limitless, that becomes the north star for the characters through all their wild ordeals. As driving motivations go, it’s easy to understand and impossible to root against. It’s just that, without any flaws or quirks to add some texture, perfection turns out not to be all that interesting by itself.