TV ODTop of the LakeThis is a beautifully shot mystery, wrapped in an unpleasant thriller that's also a morality tale"Paradise," mumbles tiny mystic GJ (Holly Hunter), peering at the surrounding mist-crowned mountains and breeze-ruffled pastures. "I chose this place for its name. This is why we came here. I wanted … (voice hardens, eyebrows scrunch) … to see Paradise for myself."
So that's Paradise, the prime patch of real estate that serves as the tumultuous backdrop to Top Of The Lake (Saturday, 9.10pm, BBC2), Jane "The Piano" Campion's bleak, eccentric six-part drama about child abuse, murder, domestic violence, painful secrets and terrible beards in a remote New Zealand community. Yes, they've called a pivotal setting Paradise. And yes, they've stuffed it with idiots and child abuse. They might as well have called it Sledgehammer Irony Bay. Or Ostensibly Idyllic Backwater Harbouring More Than Its Fair Share of Bastards View. But nothing is as it seems here. Even the cliches – which are plentiful – are accompanied by the suspicion that there's something going on beneath the clunkiness, something Profound and Awful that will rear up from the depths and thwack us in the preconceptions.
The oddness is there from the get-go. Not least in the title sequence: a starkly beautiful animation in which various disconcerting objects – a decapitated deer, a baby's skeleton, the words "PETER MULLAN" – sink languidly, and very much dead-ly, to the depths of a picturesque lake, all accompanied by the desolate plinks of a perturbed piano. Emerging from the gloom is Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss, excellent), a preoccupied, sensitive Sydney detective returning to her hometown to nurse her cantankerous mother, only to find herself drawn into an investigation into the abuse of a pregnant 12-year-old girl. Whodunnit? "No one," murmurs the child.
The finger of suspicion, though, jabs wildly at her father Matt Mitcham (Mullan, even more terrifying than usual), a repellent knot of machismo and beard who spends his days angrily chopping meat and telling GJ and her flaky menopausal followers to take their makeshift commune and leave Paradise immediately because, "It's ma land, YA LEZZERS."
While the investigation thickens, insufferable new age oracle GJ comforts her acolytes by saying, "I like penis," while her chinos billow dramatically in the breeze. The peculiarness mounts. There's a man with a head tattoo who eats cornflakes with his face millimetres from the bowl. A tramp who smacks himself repeatedly about the body. 74% of the population looks like Willie Nelson. There are guns, animal bones, lovely higgledy-piggledy Kiwi vowels and shopkeepers who scowl menacingly and tell customers they'll be with them in "jest a succund".
This is not Midsomer Murders. Nor for that matter is it Prime Suspect, or The Killing, or The Fall, or any of the other female detective-led series that have inevitably found themselves dusted down by critics and compared, awkwardly, with this oddity, like strangers forced together at a dinner party because the host heard they occasionally wear skirts. It's not even a crime drama. Not really. Instead, it's a beautifully shot mystery, wrapped in an unpleasant thriller that's also a morality tale, which is in turn woven through with ancient myths and tart observations on feminism.
So odd is it all, it's almost impossible to get a handle on it. Is it a socially conscious Twin Peaks pastiche? Is it a meditation on the incompatibility of the sexes with additional penis jokes? And crucially: would it still be good if it had been filmed in, say, Brentwood? Would the drama have the same impact if the stunning mountains and fields were just some streets, or if Elisabeth Moss crying in a forest was Bradley Walsh eating a cheese pasty in a Saab? Not sure. But it doesn't matter. Top Of The Lake has created its own world. And in these days of DCI Luther shouting "WHYYYYYY" in the rain, it's almost a relief to surrender to the strangeness and be sucked into such bewildering depths. Come on in. The water's horrible.
Check back for the weekly Top of the Lake recap blog, which will be online immediately after the first episode has aired on BBC2.
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