UKTV’s Top of the Lake managed to end with both a bang and a whimper – the whimper being from viewers who had finally managed to persuade themselves that Al the policeman (David Wenham) was a good guy after all.
It turned out that he was unimaginably worse than the series’ ostensible villains, the brutal alcoholic drug lord and suspected child-rapist and his pitbull sons.
It has been the most demanding watch on television for a long time, this dense saga of a misogynist, child-exploiting paradise in Queenstown.
Writer-director Jane Campion kept turning the plot screws tighter, forcing the viewer to confront as normal a culture of gang rape, fearfully mute children and drug peddling, even while making it obvious that something even more sinister was going on below the surface.
The series pulled off the trick essential to mysteries these days, of making you as fascinated by the characters as by the whodunit, without any discount on the suspense and shock front. Sure, we knew there was a big air bubble saying “False!” over Al’s head, but before the stomach-punching final scenes, it was all too easy to conclude that he was just one of those good ol’ boy cops who like to maintain order by tacitly enabling the usual suspects, rather than stirring things up.
And Laketop is absolutely that sort of town. In a specially telling scene, the heroine, detective Robin (Elizabeth Moss), begs a group of the drug boss’s P-lab women staffers to testify against him. They say, basically, “Butt out, do-gooder”.
They’re earning better money in better conditions than they could dream of elsewhere. The boss is good to them and their kids. They’re “family”.
By degrees, we learn that the local young teens are hiding and protecting the pregnant 12-year-old Tui, daughter of the drug lord.
That’s not all they’re hiding, but it’s not till Robin connects the pattern of youngsters’ deaths and mysterious fears with the cafe that Al runs on the side that she cracks the case. In a scene reminiscent of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo finale, she locates Al’s horrific paedophile room, in which his young barista trainees have been drugged and raped by wealthy tourists for heaven knows how long.
Top of the Lake’s many incidental pleasures included Holly Hunter as the charmlessly misanthropic New-Age healer, the two sleuthing Shanes, some haunting original music and even, backhandedly, the hostility and boredom with which Tui approaches motherhood.
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Nothing about this story was easy or obvious.
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