Top of the Lake

Elisabeth Moss stars in this thrilling, seven-episode television series, perhaps the toughest, wildest drama Campion has ever made. With its vast, primal setting and six-hour time frame, Top of the Lake is episodic television as epic poem, the Trojan War recast as gender battle. Moss plays a detective who has returned to the bleak rural town where she grew up in order to spend time with her dying mother, and is soon recruited by the sole local police officer (David Wenham) to investigate a case of statutory rape. The 12-year-old victim refuses to disclose who got her pregnant, but there are no lack of suspects. The themes that underscore Campion’s films are all here, particularly the fear that bedevils female agency: of making bad, even deadly, choices in matters of sex and love.