Adapted from Trent Dalton’s 2019 novel, Boy Swallows Universe is a sprawling coming-of-age story about a precocious teen, Eli Bell (Felix Cameron), surrounded and raised by a motley crew of outlaws and outcasts in a rough suburb of Brisbane, Australia, in the 1980s. Eli’s loyal older brother, Gus (Lee Tiger Halley), hasn’t uttered a word since he was eight, and their step-father, Lyle (Travis Fimmel), is a small-time heroin dealer. Also milling about town are Slim (Bryan Brown), a convicted murderer, and Teddy (Ben O’Toole), an associate of Lyle’s with a soft spot for Eli’s loving but gullible mother, Frankie (Phoebe Tonkin).
Each of the show’s seven episodes depicts a different chapter of Eli’s colorful adolescence, a structural device that allows Boy Swallows Universe to cover ground at a lively pace. No event is dwelt on too long before, true to the reality of teen life, a new set of preoccupations comes into view. As such, the action zips energetically from Lyle’s criminal dealings and Frankie’s subsequent imprisonment for them to Eli’s endeavours in the world of journalism, to the wider network of criminality at play in outer Brisbane.
Despite the show’s gritty subject matter, there’s a generosity of spirit to the early episodes. Lyle, whose career choices led Frankie to become hooked on heroin, is portrayed sympathetically—a flawed but kind-hearted man driven to crime to provide for his family. The show’s ability to treat its outcast characters with compassion liberates it from an air of moral superiority.
While Frankie sees out her four-year prison sentence, Eli and Gus go to live with their birth father, Robert (Simon Baker), an alcoholic who once drove them all off a bridge in the midst having a panic attack. He, too, is a man of multitudes: negligent but warm, a beer addict and a book lover, a typical Aussie jokester who’s sharply fearful of the outside world.
As its title suggests, Boy Swallows Universe contains magical-realist elements. Throughout, flashes of the past and future are presented in the form of hallucinatory visions and imagined phone messages. These dreamlike sequences can sometimes feel tonally incongruous but they add to the impression of a child’s wondrous version of the world. And the show’s childlike outlook, in which miracles can and do happen, permeates the plot itself: People inexplicably recover from fatal illnesses and, in one touching scene, 13-year-old Eli manages to break into Boggo Road Prison to see his mother on Christmas Day.
This, though, isn’t the extent of the show’s disregard for realism. The story becomes even more farfetched in the final episode, as Eli (now played by Zac Burgess) and fellow journalist Caitlyn (Sophie Wilde) investigate the ridiculous secret life of local philanthropist Tytus Broz (Anthony LaPaglia). As a piece of social commentary on working-class life in suburban Australia, Boy Swallows Universe is hair-raising and charming in equal measure. As a crime drama, it feels gratuitously melodramatic. The denouement in particular, which liberally employs exaggerated plot devices and stock villains, eschews the light touch of the show’s promising early episodes.
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