Ozark review – Jason Bateman and Laura Linney go wild in the country

The Lake of the Ozarks was created by damming Missouri’s Osage river in 1931. It’s an enormous, sprawling reservoir and a popular resort attracting 5 million tourists a year. As the setting for Ozark (Netflix), it also serves two purposes, as both scenic backdrop and extended metaphor. It’s a majestic landscape with an underlying creepiness. Its grandeur is not in question, but it ain’t supposed to be there.

White-collar schlub Marty Byrd (Jason Bateman, also directing) is married to Wendy (Laura Linney), who is having an affair. But that’s the least of his problems. Marty launders money for a drug cartel through his financial services firm. His business partner Bruce is skimming off the profits and the head of the cartel knows it. Bruce meets a violent end, and Marty is about to go the same way, before he saves his skin with a scheme to launder money on an unprecedented scale using a beautiful but underexploited resource: a backwater resort far from the attentions of the FBI.

Unfortunately, Marty has never been there – everything he knows, he learned from a leaflet. After relocating his faithless wife and their two kids to Missouri in a hurry, he discovers that money-washing investment opportunities are hard to come by in the Ozarks, and the local criminal fraternity wish him ill.

There’s a lot of speechifying in Ozark – people talk in full, well-wrought sentences – but the writing is up to the challenge. It’s darkly funny, unflinchingly but not gratuitously violent, and it simmers with menace. You are unlikely to leave long between episodes one and two. Bateman is great as Marty, a quick-thinking, soft-speaking hustler knitting his life back together almost as fast as it’s unravelling, switching between crime and domestic drudgery. He orders his kids to stand watch over their motel room while he’s out – there is $8m stashed under the bed – before adding: “And I’d love to not have to turn the room upside down to find the clicker.”

Ozark repeatedly overturns dramatic cliches (Marty and Wendy’s marriage is not immediately revitalised by their criminal partnership, and the local redneck badasses turn out to be highly articulate) but it’s always convincing. Linney is, as ever, magnificent. And the Lake of the Ozarks, where the deep water is never far from shore, is a gift.