Who’d be a scammer? These days, any grifter worth their salt is more likely to find their faces plastered across their streamer of choice than being able to retire into obscurity with their stolen cash. Anna Sorokin, the Tinder Swindler, Elizabeth Holmes: all have earned the dubious honour of a fictionalised retelling, and now Melissa Caddick is on the list too.
Based on the obligatory real-life story (in fact, there is a tie-in documentary coming out on the same day), ITVX’s new three-part drama Vanishing Act starts with the denouement – some unlucky beachgoers find Melissa’s gag-inducing severed foot washed up on the shore – and winds back in time to find out how we got there.
It’s certainly a compelling tale. Going back a few years to 2020, we find out how Caddick manages assets for a select group of super-rich investors, making them money and taking a cut from the profits. Quite a hefty cut, in fact: enough to drop $125,000 at Dior in one go, and take her husband and son for lavish skiing holidays abroad. Until, one day, she goes missing.
Smells like a scam – and what do you know, it is. The series lets us in on the ruse from the very start: what Melissa is actually doing is running a classic Ponzi scheme and falsifying documents to make it seem as though she’s earning her clients record-breaking profits.
So far so juicy. But wow, doesn’t it know it. “I was already a hot story,” says Kate Atkinson as Caddick at the start, via voiceover. “A few months back, when I went missing, I blew the pandemic right off the front page.” Ew. If that sounds slightly braggadocious, then wait until you hear the rest of it. The entire thing is told in Caddick’s own voice – unreliable narrator, much?
The major problem is, it makes her the hero – and the show never quite has the heart to hammer home what an undeniably bad person she is. Instead, it gives the fictionalised Melissa the chance to explain herself, lets her glory in her crimes, follows her every breezy move with an almost admiring gaze and a funky soundtrack.
The supporting cast also suffer from this lack of moral direction. The ASIC (financial fraud) investigators on her tail – Phoebe (Ursula Mills) and Vincent (Tai Hara) – are written as unsympathetic and cold, while the majority of her victims (even best friend Andrea) are treated as foolish, easy marks rather than people left with their lives in tatters. Hell, even her husband (delightful hairdresser himbo Anthony, played by Jerome Velinsky) and son Josh barely get more than ten minutes of airtime in total.
There’s also the matter of what’s real and what isn’t. I’m pretty sure the real Melissa Caddick did not fall foul of a rough-talking gangster (Colin Friels) – talk about whipping up sympathy. Nor do we know what really went on in her head in the run-up to her disappearance, and having Atkinson muse through her supposed innermost thoughts as she stews over whether or not to jump off the cliffs by her house makes the whole thing feel contrived, and a wildly implausible post-disappearance defence feels jarring and entirely undeserved.
It’s a shame. Atkinson is good in the role and commits utterly to playing all of Caddick’s many shades of grey; with better writing and editing, this could have been a compelling look at what drove her to ruin so many lives. As it is, it sacrifices nuance for glaring insensitivity and feels criminally misjudged.
