The Twelve: Cape Rock Killer review

When The Twelve: Cape Rock Killer opens with the supple strains of Donovan’s ‘Season of the Witch’ playing as two teenage girls prep for a beach party, a chill automatically sets in.

With this opening sequence, the latest instalment of Binge/Foxtel’s prestige legal drama (a loose adaptation of the Belgian series De twaalf) sets the mood and sets the story in motion.

It’s 1968 in the West Australian coastal town of Cape Rock, and the two girls, Judith Donnelly (Daisy Axon) and Susan Mead (Chloe Brink), are blissfully carefree.

Watch The Twelve: Cape Rock Killer trailer.

Still, for those of us watching, the set-up has us on edge. Hearing Judith’s mother say ‘be home by eleven’ as the girls leave the house is laden with sadness: we know they won’t.

The Twelve: double narrative

The titular murders are only the first layer of Cape Rock Killer’s dense, dual-stranded narrative.

Half a century later, English teacher Amanda Taylor (Eryn Jean Norvill, smartly and sharply refusing to soften the character’s sharp edges) is consumed by the unsolved case. With a traumatic family history and a burning desire to see justice meted out, she is feverishly working on a true-crime book that will finally solve the mystery of the Cape Rock murders. 

That’s before her life too is brutally snuffed out by an unknown assailant. But this time there’s enough evidence to place Alan Chaplin (William Zappa), tangentially connected to Judith and Susan as a young man all those years ago, under arrest for Amanda’s murder.

As he desperately pleads his innocence – although his tendency to slam his hand down hard on a table while doing so is something of a red flag … or a red herring – Alan’s wife Beth (Sarah Peirse, doing ‘stricken’ as well as anyone working) has an ace up her sleeve: her new friend and neighbour (and The Twelve’s savvy, smooth-silk protagonist), distinguished criminal barrister Brett Colby, played with a beguiling mix of slyness and sturdiness by Sam Neill.  

Colby is initially reluctant to leap to Alan’s defence — representing one’s friends is not always the shrewd play – but the complexities of the case prove too tantalising to resist, so the lawyer temporarily shelves his sideline vineyard (a knowing nod to Neill’s off-screen winemaking ventures, one presumes) to re-enter the courtroom fray.

The Twelve: meet the jury

Viewers familiar with The Twelve, however, know that we’ve only just scratched the surface, even with a cold-case murder and the subsequent killing of the amateur investigator of that brutal crime.

The hook may be the prospect of a whodunit (a double whodunit in this case) but reeling the audience in is the human drama of the dozen everyday people deliberating the case – the jury.

It’s a clever conceit, even if it has a tendency to drift towards contrivance and soapiness on occasion.

Of course people are going to bring their personal prejudices, relationships and responsibilities into the jury room, but Cape Rock Killer sometimes feels it’s juggling one or two too many storylines, although directors Madeleine Gottlieb (Erotic Stories) and Emma Jackson, not to mention the team of writers headed by Twelve series veteran Sarah Walker, deserve credit for keeping such a multi-layered production from losing focus.

This time around, I found the tales of the jurors less captivating than the central case, although a diverse and well-cast gallery of actors do fine work in bringing texture to characters who may at first glance appear hastily sketched, like Paul Tassone’s blunt personal trainer Blake and Catherine Moore’s officious jury foreperson Sharon (seemingly given that name to enable an unsubtle ‘Karen’ gag).

The more fleshed-out jurors do make for some compelling drama, though. Party girl Jazmyn, played with a nicely acidic sense of casual entitlement by Bump’s Nathalie Morris, establishes a toxic friendship with the naïve Gretel (a fine Hanah Tayeb) that threatens to destabilise the jury’s deliberations.

And Ewen Leslie brings finely detailed shading to Andrew, whose random acts of kindness soon reveal themselves to be more than garden-variety benevolence.  

The standout in this cohort is Phoenix Raei, so good in Mark Leonard Winter’s The Rooster, as widowed schoolteacher Bassam, struggling to maintain his integrity as an educator and his equilibrium as a father to his high-achieving, high-spirited teenage daughter.

The Twelve: complex crime

These storylines have heft and authority, but despite how deftly they are interwoven into the overall tapestry of Cape Rock Killer (six of the season’s eight episodes were made available for preview), the allure of The Twelve this time around sits squarely in the complexities of the crime and the trial, and the clash of Colby and his former protégé, police prosecutor Gabe Nicholls (Wentworth’s Danielle Cormack, appealingly flinty).

That Cape Rock Killer title may give off a vibe of generic Netflix true-crime documentary but that is intentional, one suspects – the conventions of the genre are both exploited and excavated here, with every character involved adding a different and revealing facet. 

Primarily, though, it’s solid and engaging entertainment, anchored by a terrific star turn by Neill, whose silver-fox maturity (may we all age as gracefully as 77-year-old Sam) is cut with a hint of mischievousness.

The Twelve: Cape Rock Killer premieres on 4 August on Binge and Foxtel.

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