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 (www.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/08/the-dry-2-review-thriller-cast-eric-bana-richard-roxburgh-anna-torv), 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.”
The BBC has picked up the new Australian mystery series ‘High Country (www.geektown.co.uk/tvairdates/high-country/)‘ for BBC iPlayer and TV channels, from Curio Pictures and Sony Pictures Television, starring ‘Wentworth’s Leah Purcell.
A fictional story inspired by true events, ‘High Country’ is an eight-part thriller that revolves around detective Andrea “Andie” Whitford (Purcell), who is transferred to the Victorian High Country and thrust into a baffling mystery of five missing persons who have vanished into the wilderness.
Through an edge-of-the-seat, high-stakes investigation, Andie uncove
rs a complex web involving murder, deceit and revenge.
The series stars Leah Purcell (Wentworth, Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson), Ian McElhinney (Game of Thrones, Derry Girls), Sara Wiseman (Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, A Place to Call Home) and Aaron Pedersen (Mystery Road, Jack Irish).
“With its eerie setting and tense atmosphere, High Country is a gripping new take on Australian rural noir,” said Sue Deeks, Head of BBC Programme Acquisition.