At its core, Marked is a quietly radical work. It asks not just how far a mother will go for her child, but what kind of world makes that question necessary in the first place.
By Joseph Jonathan
I didn’t watch as many cartoons as I’d have liked as a child, but one of the few that defined my childhood was The Lion King (1994). In one of the scenes, the wise-cracking meerkat, Timon, tells Simba, “When the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world,” speaking to a kind of emotional detachment that often feels like the only option when life becomes unbearable.
As a child, that line sounded funny. As an adult, especially in the current social and economic climate, it feels disturbingly familiar. It’s the kind of coping mechanism you learn when institutions fail, when dreams buckle under the weight of circumstance, and when the only thing more dangerous than choosing wrong is choosing nothing at all.
This quiet desperation forms the emotional backbone of Marked, a taut and morally-charged South African crime drama co-directed by Thabani Gigaba, Katlego Mokoena, Desiree Muli, Freddie Van’Dango, and Akin Omotoso.
At the centre of the six-part Netflix series is Babalwa (played with riveting restraint by Lerato Mvelase), a former police officer now working as an underpaid security guard, whose already-precarious life begins to unravel when her young daughter is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. For Babalwa, survival is not a dream to be reached; it’s a demand, clawing at the edges of her soul and dragging her into murky ethical terrain where choices blur and the lines between right and wrong dissolve.
What Marked achieves, above all, is a sense of creeping inevitability. The story doesn’t rely on melodrama or emotional fireworks to draw us into Babalwa’s moral quagmire. Instead, it erodes her world slowly, with the same cruel patience real life often employs: medical bills accumulate, her appeals for help are ignored, and her domestic life becomes a slow dance of disillusionment.
Her partner, Lungile (played with tender yet exasperating conviction by Bonko Khoza), turns to prayer with a fervency that borders on emotional detachment. His brand of faith, which initially feels noble, is eventually revealed to be less about conviction and more about paralysis: a spiritual coping mechanism that refuses to engage with material urgency.
In many ways, Marked positions itself less as a heist thriller and more as a sociological case study in desperation. The crime Babalwa orchestrates is not fuelled by greed, vengeance, or thrill, but by a primal, maternal instinct sharpened by the fear of losing a child. This distinction is critical. The show doesn’t romanticise her descent into crime. Instead, it insists on our empathy, forcing us to sit with her decisions and ask: what would I do if cornered by the same confluence of pressures?
Lerato Mvelase’s performance is quietly devastating. She refuses to play Babalwa as a martyr or a hero. Instead, her portrayal is grounded in the minutiae of daily struggle, exhausted sighs, prolonged silences, the quiet tremor of hands when they’re forced to commit acts they once judged. There’s one particular scene where Babalwa, unable to voice her guilt, simply stares into the mirror, her face betraying a soul fraying at the seams. It’s a moment that crystallises the emotional weight she carries, not just the burden of her choices, but the fact that she was made to choose at all.
Still, Marked is not solely Babalwa’s story. One of the show’s great strengths lies in its depiction of the community around her, not as faceless background characters, but as people similarly ensnared by systemic neglect. Her co-workers have their own private burdens. The criminals she engages with are not cold-hearted villains but products of the same environment that pushed her into the shadows.
Even brief encounters—a nurse who shrugs helplessly at a payment delay, a neighbour who offers unsolicited advice—feel real, textured, and consequential. This creates a world where personal downfall feels communal, a shared condition rather than an individual failure.
What also elevates Marked is its refusal to traffic in binaries. Good and evil do not exist here in any pure form. What exists instead is compromise, moral exhaustion, and the constant recalibration of what one is willing to do for love, for survival, for hope. Lungile, Babalwa’s husband, is emblematic of this moral murkiness.
His spirituality initially appears as a strength and a way to anchor a collapsing home. But as the series progresses, his insistence on divine timing becomes harder to bear. It is Babalwa who carries the weight of action, while Lungile hides behind belief. Khoza brings nuance to this role, ensuring Lungile doesn’t become a caricature of passive masculinity. He is a man broken by helplessness, clinging to prayer as both salve and shield.
This tension—between action and inaction, between agency and faith—is the show’s most compelling throughline. In many African societies, religion is a powerful social force, often filling the void left by broken institutions. But Marked is interested in the limitations of that faith. What happens when prayer isn’t enough? What happens when God is supposedly silent?
South Africa, like much of the continent, carries the long shadow of inequality, unemployment, and post-apartheid disillusionment. Marked is deeply aware of this, even if it doesn’t always name it outright. The series is steeped in the quiet violence of poverty, the kind that doesn’t make headlines but eats away at dignity.
Security guards like Babalwa are essential to the functioning of urban spaces, yet they are invisible, expendable. That she must turn on the very system she once served as a cop is a bitter irony the show never loses sight of.
The final episode of Marked could pass off as a lesson in narrative restraint and philosophical provocation. Rather than offering tidy closure, it invites the viewer to wrestle with ambiguity. The resolution hinges not on a grand twist, but on a spiritual sleight of hand. Did Babalwa’s actions save her daughter? Or was it divine providence? The show never tells. Instead, it expands the frame, offering a panoramic view of cause and effect, faith and fallout. It forces us to ask whether belief can coexist with doubt, and whether salvation—spiritual or otherwise—should depend on sacrifice.
In a streaming era oversaturated with gritty dramas (with a number of them being epic fails), Marked stands apart in its unflinching attention to the moral and material costs of survival. It doesn’t use poverty as an aesthetic, nor does it glamorise criminality. Instead, it lingers in the discomfort, in the slow unraveling of certainty. There are no easy heroes here. Just people trying to live, and systems that make that living unbearably hard.
At its core, Marked is a quietly radical work. It asks not just how far a mother will go for her child, but what kind of world makes that question necessary in the first place. In doing so, it joins a growing lineage of African storytelling that refuses victimhood, that refuses simplicity, that insists on the complexity of our lives, and the dignity in telling them truthfully.
Rating: 3.2/5
Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @JosieJp3.