The first few minutes of Oscar-winning director Jane Campion’s haunting BBC miniseries, Top of the Lake, find a young girl slowly wading into the freezing water, the silhouette of New Zealand mountains emerging through the surrounding mist. Her glassy expression is unreadable and the scene stunningly seductive, but when a frazzled adult arrives and yells that the water could kill her, we begin to understand that there’s a sinister force behind the tranquil landscape. As the story unfolds, its characters disturb the surface in more ways than one, peeling back the outward layers of both their small, sleepy town and their own pasts to discover more corruption than they might have imagined.
Only seven episodes long and yet nominated for eight Emmys (that includes a Best Actress nod for star Elisabeth Moss, who has also been nominated for her supporting role in Mad Men), Top of the Lake is arguably the greatest thing on television that no one has heard of, now streaming on Netflix. Moss delivers her strongest performance yet as Robin Griffin, the detective who takes on the case of a missing 12-year-old girl, Tui, who also happens to be mysteriously pregnant.
Much like Peggy in Mad Men, Robin is a strong-willed woman trying to make her voice heard in a man’s world, where the general attitude toward a missing, pregnant preteen is surprisingly cavalier. With Campion as the show’s co-creator, it’s no surprise that the entire narrative is skewed toward—deep breath—a feminist perspective, tackling the reverberating consequences of sexual assault and abuse in a way that’s less contrived and more realistic than anything else I’ve seen on screens both large and small.
That’s a far cry from the gritty, confrontational approach of crime shows like CSI or Law and Order, where the same subjects are treated in a clinical manner. Nothing on Top of the Lake is so clear-cut or easily resolved, and the damaging effects of every action are insidious, rearing their ugly head when you least expect it.
It’s not until the fourth episode, for example, that Robin reveals a part of her past that explains both her deep connection to and fierce determination to find Tui in the face of relative apathy from Police Chief Al Parker (David Wenham) and other officers.
It’s a heartbreaking moment that must have required remarkable preparation from Moss. This first real demonstration of vulnerability indicates her slow descent into rough emotional territory, where all her defenses are down, and it soon becomes impossible to separate her own story from that of Tui.
Similarly, what appear to be fairly insignificant subplots, such as the arrival of a battered women’s collective headed by a sassy guru named GJ (Holly Hunter) in the area, or the growing romance between Robin and local scruffy heartthrob Johnno (Thomas M. Wright), all reach a kind of thematic coherence that isn’t initially clear.
These subplots are also simply satisfying stories in their own right. The New Age-y women’s group within the small New Zealand town community provides both comic relief and a sounding board for the surrounding chaos, while the Robin-Johnno affair allows for some serious outdoor sexy times that actually made me say “hot damn” out loud. (NB: I watched the entire series alone in bed, wearing my Taylor Swift t-shirt and steadily working through a bag of Milanos.) All kidding aside, nothing ever feels forced and no detail is wasted on the viewer.
Still, the tempting “It all connects and there’s an answer for everything,” closed approach of most mystery narratives is forgone for something far more open-ended and less neatly packaged. The case is solved and achieves closure, yet it’s not the kind of story that is slave to the machinations of its plot.
Unlike Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s cult ‘90s series to which it has been endlessly compared, Top of the Lake doesn’t overreach by throwing out endless red herrings and leaving far too many loose ends. Nevertheless, both shows are concerned with the blurred lines (please go away, Robin Thicke) of their respective mysteries, subverting the moral certainties of such tales. In a way, they’re not about disturbing the surface of everyday life at all, but about revealing such a distinction between good and evil to be a mere figment of our imaginations.
