The day of ‘female rage’ has dawned – and Kate Winslet is its fed-up face | Emma Brockes

The I'm-done-with-it energy of Mare of Easttown has resonated because it reflects exactly how so many of us feel

There's a scene in Mare of Easttown, the new crime drama on HBO/Sky Atlantic starring Kate Winslet, that with minimal fuss captures a mood rarely seen on TV. Winslet plays a detective in smalltown Pennsylvania, where - when she's sitting on her sofa one night eating an enormous sandwich - a neighbour throws a gallon of milk through her window. She stops eating, briefly, to survey the wreckage, before returning with exquisite deliberation to the sandwich. Through Winslet's character, Mare, Easttown nails that rarely excavated, beautifully enacted vibe of the fed-up middle-aged woman.

It is hard to overstate how much excitement this and similar scenes have caused among women in the US since the show started airing, two weeks ago. It's not merely that Mare reflects back at us the bombed-out, personal-grooming-gone-to-seed reality of life at the tail end of the pandemic. Nor is it a case of the overused trope of a movie star eschewing makeup as a shorthand for integrity. (I loved the movie Nomadland, recently bombarded with Oscars, but Frances McDormand has in recent years perhaps over-ploughed this furrow to the extent that it can have the opposite effect, making the act of appearing ordinary" seem a little stagey and performative.)