TV review: Top of The Lake

It is no surprise then that someone among the nation's most illustrious glitterati, with the talent to do so, would want to dispel a few touchy-touchy, feely-feely notions we may have about this fascinating country.

I'm sure director and co-writer Jane Campion – who brought us The Piano to much acclaim 20 years ago - would have been itching to offer the world a view of her homeland which doesn't involve any of the above.

Mind you, murder, the suggestion of rampant and uncontrollable sexuality (not to mention incest) and a wholly misogynistic society, might not exactly be what was mentioned to the New Zealand Tourist Board, when they heard that a major new series was being filmed in some of their most picturesque lakes and mountains in the South Island's extremities.

The lake is key to the story, as much as the obelisk is in 2001: A Space Odyssey. We begin with 12-year-old schoolgirl Tui up to her neck in its freezing cold waters and saved from a horrible death by a teacher who sees her while driving by on the school bus.

It transpires that Tui is pregnant and it's not long before visiting police detective Robin Griffin, played by Elizabeth Moss from the highly-popular Mad Men, takes her under her wing.

Then suddenly, Peter Mullan, as Scottish as you please with wild long hair and a very short temper, who is some kind of underground Mr Big with two strapping sons to throw their weight about on his behalf, bursts onto the screen, raging about some bonkers women who have found refuge on the land where his mother is buried.

He goes up there and barely manages to contain his nastiness and anger during a confrontation with the commune women who are led by an equally wildly-long-haired GJ, played by Holly Hunter putting on a credible Yoda voice, for some reason.

Why have we been brought here, we ask? It is soon revealed of course, that Mullan, Matt Mitcham in the drama, is Tui's old dad, ah, isn't that nice?

Tui herself, fears the worst and ends up riding out on horseback, with shotgun and a little pooch in hand, to the women's refuge where GJ tells her that her baby is a 'time bomb and it's going to go off – boom!'

In the meantime, Mitcham and his boys have caught up with Bob, the chap who they thought they had a deal with over the land called Paradise, where the women are now encamped, and the suggestion is that he sold it behind their back. Bob ends up in the water, dead.

Finally, Tui is discovered missing, her little dog is back home with her sinister father, with Detective Griffin visiting the household, after getting through the security gates, to try and interview the young girl about what happened to her. She then finds the horse she rode out on wandering around and the women at the refuge say that she left early that morning . . .

It's not looking good for Tui, suffice it to say.

Aside from the stereotypes, which I suppose you could call ironic over-playing by some of the actors involved, this is gripping drama and could quite easily be from the mind of some other wacky genius such as David Lynch. In fact, some of the shots of the landscape do emulate so much the rugged backdrops we saw in Twin Peaks, and I don't think that that is merely by accident.

Mullan as Mitcham is such a nasty piece of work, it would be far too obvious for him to be behind all the bad things going on, but there is the suggestion that he is practically fathering all the children in the community and having a hand in all the unexplained deaths of people in the lake, including Det Griffin's own father who succumbed to the icy waters himself.

Intriguing! That's an understatement and I'm sure viewers will be hooked and ready to let themselves be immersed in the gloriously grim and grown-up goings on.

Series' like these don't come along very often, and if you haven't caught a glimpse of it yet, I strongly recommend you do.

Graeme Andrew