There’s murder, mystery and a stink-load of genre elements in High Country, a potboiler-ish crime series given a glossy cinematic varnish and a rock-solid lead performance from Leah Purcell. She plays detective Andie Whitford, a city cop who has been relocated to the town of Brokenridge in the titular Victorian region, where the magisterial beauty of mountains, valleys, rivers and creeks has been tainted somewhat by the proliferation of dead bodies and disappearances.
Co-created by Marcia Gardner and John Ridley, and co-directed by Kevin Carlin and Beck Cole, the show arrives hot on the heels of the feature film Force of Nature: The Dry 2, which is also (mostly) based in wet-looking Victorian wilderness, also involves a missing person’s case, and also deploys a clever detective from the big smoke.
Whitford has recently relocated to Brokenridge with her partner, Helen (Sara Wiseman) and teenage daughter, Kirra (Pez Warner). She experiences a baptism of fire after the disappearance of a man who has ditched his car and walked off into the wilderness, followed soon after by a second discovery: the body of a murdered hiker.
Ascertaining that three people have gone missing within a 40km radius in the space of a year, Whitford tells Ian McElhinney’s Sam Dyson, the retiring sergeant she’s replacing, “In the city we call that a pattern.” He responds: “Up here, it’s a fact of life.” This is a good example of compact screenwriting; of the ability of the screenwriters (Gardner, Ridley and Cole) to conjure tight and punchy scenes – which is, generally speaking, a good thing, helping to keep the pace pretty taut.
There are some scenes and some characters, however, that I wanted more time with. In the second episode, for instance, when Whitford meets an Aboriginal woman who inspires her to connect to country; she’s played by the always-great Trisha Morton-Thomas, who’s criminally underused in Australian film and television and only very briefly appears here. Veteran actor Melissa Jaffer, most famous in recent years for playing the “Keeper of the Seeds” in Mad Max: Fury Road, also has a tantalisingly small role as Whitford’s debilitated elderly mother, Liz.
Among the more prominent presences in the narrative is Damien (Henry Nixon), a former school teacher who claims to be psychic. After his apparent “visions” led to the discovery of a child’s corpse, he became a pariah and is now the prime suspect in the current investigation. Whitford boldly brings Damien into the case as a consultant, in an effort to trap him; meanwhile, Dyson sees Damien as his white whale and devotes his retirement to pursuing him, convinced of his guilt. A wall in the ex-cop’s home is plastered with photographs, notes and diagrams; what would a mystery crime series be without one?
If you’re thinking this all sounds familiar, High Country is, indeed, a grab bag of genre elements. It’s clear the storytellers have some tricks up their sleeves, inevitably delivering twists, turns and misdirection en route to an eventual grand reveal (this review covers the first four episodes). It’s never badly staged, even if aspects of the writing feel very engineered – very “pay attention, because this might be important”.
Even casual appreciators of the genre can start to see patterns and second-guess otherwise ordinary occurrences. In these stories it’s common for screenwriters to double down on the “this time it’s personal” element, which often feels contrived. As soon as Kirra was introduced, I thought “uh-oh she’s going to find herself in trouble later, when Whitford’s professional and personal lives collide”.
It’s hard for any actor to meaningfully deliver lines like “something just doesn’t sit right” and “you gotta look at every angle” but Purcell makes a good fist of it; from the start you feel as though you’re in good hands. She has an engaging presence and is probably the show’s best asset. Nixon is strong too, in a difficult role that requires the viewer to entertain the possibility of both Damien’s innocence and his guilt. His character represents an interesting predicament: if he’s a villain, he’s bizarrely brazen; if he’s innocent, the story must do something to address those “visions”.
When High Country enters more enigmatic territory, drawing on symbolism and mythology, you can sense it starting to buckle under the strain. This production isn’t on the same level as the Mystery Road series, or a Vicki Madden production à la The Gloaming and The Kettering Incident, which tap into higher and bolder spaces – but High Country is still thoroughly decent and I’m curious to see how it ends.
High Country starts on Tuesday 19 March on Binge with a double episode and then new episodes weekly.
