If ‘beautiful scenery, shame about the locals’ isn’t the town motto for Evelyn Bay, then the local chamber of commerce isn’t doing their job.
The latest in a long, long line of Australian small towns haunted by a dark past even as the present day body count continues to climb, it’s the kind of place where the young folk are aggressive idiots, the town elders don’t want any trouble, and the local cops don’t seem to understand what ‘securing the crime scene’ actually means. Welcome to The Survivors, enjoy your stay!
Fifteen years ago, two men – one his own brother – drowned trying to rescue Kieran (Charlie Vickers) from an ocean-front cave in Evelyn Bay. Now he’s back with partner Mia (Yerin Ha) and their young daughter, and they probably should have checked the calendar before getting on the plane back to Tasmania because the anniversary is only a few days away and the big memorial footy match is already stirring up a lot of bad memories.
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Leading the ‘is this visit really a good idea?’ charge is Kieran’s mother Verity (Robyn Malcolm). She never got over the death of one son and the other leaving town as fast as possible, and with her husband Brian (Damien Garvey) now suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s she’s got a lot on her plate and she’s not afraid to let the awkward pauses drag out.
The only people seemingly happy to see Kieran and Mia back in town are old friends Ash (George Mason), Sean (Thom Green), and Liv (Jessica De Gouw). While they don’t hold a grudge against Kieran, they don’t seem to have noticed that literally everyone else in town does. So yeah, a quick catch up down at the pub run by the quietly menacing father (Martin Sacks) of one of the men who died? Great idea!
It’s around this stage that Kieran – who’s been a sad sack ever since he got off the plane – starts to look like the only person actually responding to what’s going on around him. The town feels rotten to the core, which probably isn’t great for newcomer Bronte (Shannon Berry), who’s in town for the summer, staying with Liv, and running around taking photos to put on her IG while talking ominously about a dead girl nobody will talk about.
Turns out that maybe the reason nobody is talking about the dead girl is because if they do they also end up dead. Case in point: the morning after the rough night at the pub, Bronte is found dead on the beach.
It rapidly becomes clear that just about everyone is a suspect (even Brian was out for a wander that night). And then there’s the matter of the mystery Bronte was investigating, which points back to Kieran’s time in the cave 15 years ago. Is this latest killing somehow linked? And if so, will the killer stop at Bronte?
The Survivors: intriguing
As mysteries go, The Survivors (adapting a novel by Jane Harper) does a solid job of setting up an intriguing premise. There’s plenty of suspects, and a few obvious red herrings that’ll no doubt end up having a skeleton or two in the closet. Taken as a pure whodunnit, it ticks all the boxes; it’d be a first-rate drama if only Kieran – or anybody else – seemed likeable.
To be fair, everyone has a pretty good reason for being the way they are. Kieran is back solely out of a sense of duty to the parents he ran away from, while his left-behind mates are the kinds of screw-ups you’d expect to stick around in an isolated small town. Everyone else blames him for the two deaths (losing his own brother gets him no sympathy), and fair enough.
But it means that the lead starts out sullen and beaten down, while pretty much everywhere he goes someone is giving him a hard time – including his mother, who it turns out has basically adopted the main guy hurling abuse at him. It’s not exactly an inviting start to a series: Bronte is pretty much the only character who seems to have her act together, and look how she ends up.
As always with this kind of mystery, the characters deepen the more that’s revealed. It’s no spoiler to say the two big mysteries are tied together: if Kieran can solve one, maybe he’ll be able to escape his past. And the locations – it was filmed around Eaglehawk Bay – look fantastic (though is the ‘Tassie, where sun loves to land’ poster an official tourism slogan?).
You just have to get past an opening episode that makes Evelyn Bay seem like a small town you’d drive through with your doors locked and windows wound up.
