Jane Campion’s seven-part crime story is slow, odd and for the most part sure of itself, with Elisabeth Moss doing the best work in it as a detective who should not have taken the case. The women’s camp at Paradise is where it wobbles.
Jane Campion and Gerard Lee have written seven hours of crime television, and it is not quite a police procedural and does not want to be. A twelve-year-old girl is pregnant and then gone. A detective who grew up in the town comes back to look for her. Around that thread Campion hangs a portrait of a place where the men have the land and the guns and the women have arrived in shipping containers to sit by the shore and talk about their lives. It is slow, it is strange, and for most of its seven episodes we were held.
Elisabeth Moss is the reason it holds. Robin Griffin is a detective who specialises in children and who should not be anywhere near this case, and Moss plays her as someone who knows that and cannot help herself. She listens more than she talks. When she does talk her voice goes flat and quiet, and it is the flatness that frightens; the men across the table from her keep waiting for her to raise it, and she will not.
Peter Mullan’s Matt Mitcham is the other pole. He runs the town’s drugs from a compound in the hills with his grown sons, one of them Johnno (Thomas M. Wright), who has history with Robin, and he is the sort of man who can be gentle for an entire scene before he hits somebody. Mullan gives him a grief under the menace that we did not expect and did not entirely want. David Wenham’s Al Parker, the senior detective, is affable, helpful and pours a good deal of wine, and Wenham keeps him hard to read, which we take to be the point.
Ariel Kleiman, Garth Davis and Jane Campion share the directing, and the look is consistent between them. The camera sits still and lets a figure walk into a large frame: a girl on a jetty, a woman on a track, and behind them the lake, grey-green and enormous, with mountains going up out of it. People are small in this series and the water is not. GJ’s camp, a row of rusting containers dropped on a lawn with folding chairs and a kettle, is the best set in the thing, and the funniest.
It is also where the series wobbles. Holly Hunter’s GJ has grey hair to her waist and answers every question with a question and occasionally with an insult, and Hunter plays her without a flicker of warmth, which is brave and right. The women around her, Bunny (Genevieve Lemon) and Anita (Robyn Malcolm) among them, are given speeches about ex-husbands and lost children that are meant to be funny and sad at once and often land as neither. The one mixed review we have read complains about this dialogue, and it has a point. It reads as written.
What got at us was the opening. A child in a school uniform walks into a lake in the cold, up to her chest, and stands there, and the camera does not go to her face for a long time. We were frightened for her in a way the series then spends seven hours making worse, because it keeps returning to that picture of a girl standing in water nobody else will enter. Later a bar scene between Robin and a table of Matt’s men goes on well past the point where any other series would have cut, and we watched it with a hand over our mouth.
The ending we will not describe. It resolves more than we expected and faster, and one or two turns in the final hour need more room than they get. Most critics have been warm and we are with them, a degree cooler. A second series, China Girl, followed in 2017 with six episodes; this one stands on its own.
Watch it in the dark, two episodes at a time, and do not expect to like anyone in it for long. The 15 certificate is earned: it is about a pregnant twelve-year-old, and it treats that as the horror it is.
