High Country trusts the mountains more than the mystery

Season two of High Country lands on Binge on 14 September with Brendan Cowell, Ryan Corr and Nadine Garner in it, which is a very good cast and also, if you squint, an admission. The show is coming back with Leah Purcell and a substantially new set of people around her, and that tells you which half of season one the producers thought was working.

Here it is, wait for it: the half that was working was the dirt.

Eight episodes, five missing people, one very good landscape

High Country went out from 19 March to 30 April 2024 on Binge and Showcase, created and written by Marcia Gardner and John Ridley (not that John Ridley, a different one, an Australian one, with Wentworth and Stingers on the CV, which honestly tells you more about this show than a 12 Years a Slave credit would). Kevin Carlin directed five of the eight and the finale, Beck Cole took six and seven, and Curio Pictures made it in and around Jamieson in the Victorian Alps.

The premise is five missing persons and a detective sent up from the city, which is the most standard Australian crime premise available. If you have watched The Gloaming, Scrublands, Mystery Road, Troppo, The Dry or roughly nine other things in the last six years, you have seen this shape. To its credit the show knows it, and it spends much less energy than usual pretending the plot is the reason to watch.

Leah Purcell is not doing a genre performance

Purcell plays Sergeant Andie Whitford, and what is unusual about the performance is how unhurried it is. Every other lead in this genre plays a detective with a secret, a bottle, or a dead spouse, and Purcell mostly refuses to play any of it as machinery. Andie has the full apparatus bolted to her, and Purcell keeps declining to lean on it. She plays a competent middle-aged professional doing her job in a place where the job is harder because everyone already knows everyone.

There is a quality she has, and it is hard to describe without sounding like I am giving out participation ribbons, of listening to another actor as if she has not read the script. It is a very tiring thing to do for eight hours of television and she does it in nearly every scene. Aaron Pedersen turns up as Owen Cooper and the two of them together produce the only scenes in the season where I did not know what was going to happen next.

Ian McElhinney is having a lovely time as a retired copper who knows more than he says, which is a role, not a character, and he is good enough that you do not mind. Linda Cropper and Geoff Morrell are both doing more with less than the script gives them. Sara Wiseman gets the season’s least rewarding job.

The alps are the co-lead

Here is what the show gets genuinely right, and it is not a small thing. Australian rural noir has a bad habit of shooting the landscape as a mood board: golden hour, drone up, cue the cello, we are all very haunted. High Country mostly shoots the alps as terrain. Cold, wet, steep, and inconvenient. Roads that take an hour. Mist that is a visibility problem before it is a metaphor. Places that are genuinely difficult to search, which matters enormously in a show about people who have gone missing in them.

That is the difference between landscape as atmosphere and landscape as plot, and this show, more often than not, gets it on the right side of the line. Jamieson and the surrounding country are photographed as a working environment with people in it who have to drive through it in the dark.

And then there is the plot

Look. The mystery is fine. It resolves. Everything connects. That is more than some of these shows manage.

But the last two episodes ask you to accept a quantity of interlinked revelation that the previous six had not been quietly building toward, and there is a stretch in the back half where the season stops being about a search and starts being about a conspiracy, which is the point at which most Australian crime dramas lose me. A search has a shape: you are looking for a person, in a place, and either you find them or you do not. A conspiracy has no shape at all, it just has more of itself.

The less said about the way certain character motivations arrive in episode seven the better. David Knox gave it four stars and he is not wrong about Purcell. The Guardian gave it three and called it decent if familiar, which is also right, and the two reviews are basically describing the same show from different distances.

What season two has to fix

Two years is a long gap and the recast is a real opportunity. If Gardner and Ridley have looked at the first season honestly, they will have noticed that nobody came out of it quoting the plot and everybody came out of it talking about Purcell standing in the fog.

The fix is not a better conspiracy. It is fewer things to connect. Give Andie one disappearance, give the alps eight hours to be difficult, and let Purcell do the thing she is manifestly better at than almost anyone else on Australian television, which is to be watched while thinking. Cowell, Corr and Garner are not the sort of hires you make for a show that intends to stay in its lane, so somebody up there is at least awake.

I will be watching on the fourteenth. Cautiously. In the way you watch a show you already like and do not entirely trust.