A windswept beach. Two young women who look vaguely up to no good. Audiences don’t have a long wait in the pilot of Deadloch (or Deadlake in American English) to figure out which way this is going to go. In the first sixty seconds of the first episode of this Australian crime mystery/feminist noir/black comedy, we get: 1) a gnarly dead body, and 2) an errant cigarette dropped on the corpse’s penis. That’s not a spoiler. It happens in the first 60 seconds. On that note, there are some light spoilers ahead.
The first season of Deadloch dropped on Amazon Prime this past June, from creators Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney (McCartney openly identifies as queer). I do not keep up with TV – there are too many damn movies – but it was only a few weeks before multiple smart people with very good taste were repeating the same sales pitch to me: 1) crime, and 2) lesbians. Bonus points for Tasmanian accents, if you’re into that (and I am). I tripped over myself to get there, and have watched it twice so far.
Deadloch deftly navigates body horror, crime drama, and character development. Crime and comedy are two genres I don’t hang with very often, but I will tolerate a lot in the name of watching lesbians being competent. We follow FORMER detective Dulcie Collins (Kate Box, also queer, also this show is chockablock with Kates) as the barely competent police department attempts to deal with their first murder in forever. The entire supporting cast is spot on, plenty to love and hate. But the real trouble starts with detective Eddie Redcliffe breezes in to take over the investigation and rain down incompetence with her deep, deep apathy for proper procedure, the law, or common courtesy – Dulcie’s most treasured values.
The emotional heart of the story is these two lesbians one lesbian and one queer-coded but apparently heterosexual woman finding what they need personally and professionally, and supporting each other to find it. Inviting some hate with this admission, but even though I walked in expecting a Dulcie/Eddie romance, I really do appreciate that romance is taken off the board because Dulcie is married and Eddie is (apparently) heterosexual. If we didn’t have Dulcie’s wife Cath, we wouldn’t have anyone normalizing calling your wife “sexy” while she’s at work, and we would not have my favorite line from episode 7: “Cath! Stop inserting yourself into everything, you emotional truffle pig!”
Sorry if I’m going on about emotions and stuff – ick. For horror-loving audiences, I will add that there is a disturbingly high body count in the titular sleepy Tasmanian town of Deadloch, and as the season progresses across eight one-hour episodes, the deaths get more vicious and the mystery more cuckoo-bananas. It builds to a conclusion as satisfying as any clap-back culturally-conscious horror movie (The Menu and Promising Young Woman come immediately to mind). There are red herrings aplenty (some obvious, some less so), but I won’t give it away here. I did not see it coming in quite the way it did, which is always a delight.
And if you make it through all the chaos and death, my biggest laugh of the series was in the final minute of the last episode. I’m a little bit in awe of writers who can pull off an opening and a closing that both make my jaw hit the floor.
No word yet on a second season, but I’m speaking it into the universe here. Please. Do you know what would help? Watch Deadloch and tell all your friends about it.
Rating:
By Tiffany Albright
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