A Remarkable Place to Die

While a murder mystery drama is unfolding for the good folk of Queenstown in new drama series A Remarkable Place to Die, the drama of the surrounding landscape is undeniable.

The aerial shots and the vistas are truly captivating, so much so they upstage the whodunnit action led by Detective Anaís Mallory (Chelsie Preston Crayford).

Anais has returned to Queenstown from Sydney to become the local lead detective. Hmm sounds familiar. There’s a frosty reception from mum Veronica (Rebecca Gibney), who says ‘darling’ a lot but doesn’t appear to mean it very much. That’s because, in between pouring herself the red wines, she holds Anais partly-responsible for the death of her other daughter, which took place some years earlier.

Meanwhile there is a more pressing police matter to address with an SUV tumbling off a cliff with a body inside.

Local coppers Constable Jarrod Renner (Dahnu Graham) and Senior Constable Hoana Rata (Roimata Fox) have their work cut out to identify the badly damaged body but Inspector Sharon Li Feng (Lynette Forday) welcomes Anais to the team, partnering her with Detective Simon Delaney (Matt Whelan).

Investigations ensue with a range of locals including her ex Luke (Charles Jazz Terrier), who just happened to marry her best friend Maja (Indiana Evans). There’s also a wealthy importer and partner, a backpacker manager and some Brazilian food van operators.

We also meet handsome pathologist Ihaka (Alex Tarrant) who offers crucial clues and a little emotional support for our heroine when she needs it most.

Much of the extensive movie-length episodes see Anais questioning suspects, piecing together clues, and hitting obligatory dead ends. But the locations never stop, lakeside with mountain ranges at every turn. The shots, and the autumn colours, are amongst the better features of a fairly pedestrian crime mystery.

Anais also touches upon her backstory in which the death of her sister looms large. Expect this to roll out over the four episodes.

Chelsie Preston Crayford is in almost every scene, admirably carrying the load of the series, getting next to no help from her counterpart who is underwritten with no initiative. Rebecca Gibney serves as a support in a role she could phone in from mountain retreat while Dahnu Graham as a bumbling young cop is the sole comic relief.

The episodes are way too long which causes the pace of the show to drag and it might have worked better trimmed down to an hour. It’s hard not to think of Return to Paradise, in which a detective returns home to her ghosts and to solve new crimes, sticking to genre turning points, with lashings of quirky times and very little blood.

With such a magical landscape surrounding this tale, it really needed to match the setting better than this.

A Remarkable Place to Die screens 8pm Sunday on Nine.