High Country, BBC One, review: formulaic and predictable – but the ...

A big-city cop relocates to a remote rural backwater and finds herself plunged into a tight knit community nursing deep, dark secrets. When it comes to crime thriller originality, BBC One’s latest Australian buy-in High Country is not exactly pushing the boat out. 

What it does have going for it is the Alps. Not the snow-capped European version but the Victorian version, a lush and spookily lovely corner of Australia that has thus far remained relatively unexploited on screen. That’s a mystery because the beautiful but brooding landscape, breathtaking vistas dotted with treacherous ravines and thickets of verdant undergrowth is ideal territory for folk to go missing in. Which they do, in dizzying number, in High Country. 

Tasked with trying to make sense of it all – there are an awful lot of names to keep track of – is Sergeant Andrea “Andie” Whitford, who has landed in the remote township of Brokenridge in order to keep her family safe from a dangerous con nursing a grudge against her. Andie is the thread intended to tie High Country’s multifarious plot strands and themes together and, thanks to a convincingly no-nonsense performance from Leah Purcell, who makes spiky Andie oddly likeable, it just about holds. 

Unravelling a knotty maze that kicks off as a cold-case child murder but spirals into, among other things, a complex conspiracy involving an oddball psychic, a white dingo and musings on her own ethnic identity – she’s part Aborigine – is no mean feat. But Purcell keeps Andie on the case while all around her are trying to throw us off the scent of what High Country is trying to be about. 

Are we meant to focus on retired cop Sam (Ian McElhinney, reliably crusty) and his odd obsession with Damian, the local mystic and suspected child killer? Or should the spotlight be on creepy art patron Rose and her efforts to take Andie’s frustrated painter wife Helen under her wing? Then there’s the aforementioned dingo, a mild foray into magic realism, teens going off the rails and Andie’s dementia-suffering mum to add to the overcrowded picture. 

A word of warning: not all these loose ends are remotely tied up by the end. Yet High Country does weave a curiously meandering spell as it ambles to its labyrinthine climax. So kick back and drink in the dreamy scenery, the true star of the show.