The Survivors, the Netflix series from The Dry author Jane Harper, lives up to the hype

Australia Broadcast Center

5 hours ago

By all outward appearances, The Survivors is just another cliché of its genre.
What: An Australian murder-mystery adapted from Jane Harper's bestselling novel.
Directed by: Tony Ayres
Starring: Charlie Vickers, Yerin Ha, Robyn Malcolm, Damien Garvey, Thom Green, Shannon Berry, Catherine McClements, Miriama Smith, Don Hany.
When: On Netflix now
Likely to make you feel: Gripped (and craving a holiday in Tassie).
In a small town full of buried secrets, everyone becomes a suspect when a young woman's body washes up on the beach.
As its director Tony Ayres explains, the show's very premise puts it at risk of 'the worst version' of murder mystery: "Dead girl entertainment."
'Often, women being murdered feels more consequential as a story,' he told The Screen Show's Jason di Rosso.
For him, the only way to approach this trope was to delve further.
"It's not as though women being murdered is not something that happens every week in Australia. It's not as though it's not a reality," he said.
"The best version of this [story] asks: why does this happen?"
In his six-part series — adapted from the bestselling novel by Jane Harper and now released on Netflix — this question is explored in a uniquely Australian setting, as a town of "good blokes" and their women, "true locals" and outsiders are thrust under the spotlight.
The Survivors is set in the fictional Tasmanian tourist town of Evelyn Bay, where tight-knit locals are still mourning the two young men who died in a freak storm 15 years earlier.
Finn and Toby were top blokes in a stereotypically Australian understanding of the term: they looked out for their mates; they loved a banter over a beer; and they were good at footy.
But Evelyn Bay has all but forgotten Gabby, the young girl who also went missing that day, and they dismiss her grieving mother as a hysterical nutcase.
When Kieran Elliott (Charlie Vickers) returns to his hometown with his young baby in tow, he's constantly reminded by the town – and particularly by his mother – that those men, one of whom was his brother, drowned trying to save him.
His wife Mia (Yerin Ha) grew up as one of the only Asian-Australians in Evelyn Bay, and became even more of an outsider when her best friend Gabby went missing that day.
As Kieran and Mia endure their frosty homecoming, another woman is found washed up on the beach, and this time the town can't look away.
It's easy for local crime to feel a little cliched, but The Survivors flows so naturally it almost feels like a true crime piece.
For Ayres, it was important to twist the "dead girls" narrative into a story that felt "useful and reflective, that generates conversation, rather than [present it] in a way which is just kind of packaged".
And the women of The Survivors are far from victims. Both of the mystery girls feel like fully fledged characters, while the women who call Evelyn Bay home display determination and nuance throughout.
Particularly impressive is Robyn Malcolm as Kieran's mum Verity, who's lost one son and blames another for his death. At once a terrifying force and earnestly vulnerable, she is deeply protective of her town, its conventions and the men who inhabit it.
Verity's tense relationship with her daughter-in-law contrasts with her infatuation with her new granddaughter, and their classic dynamic is deepened by their cultural differences.
"As a child from an Asian background, you are never supposed to speak up against your elders," Ayres explains.
"So when Mia first enters the story, she is very polite … but you can see a steeliness underneath that."
Her patience with her mother-in-law eventually dissolves into a "rip roaring fight" by episode four, which Ayres says was one of his personal highlights of the series.
Evelyn Bay is a town that fiercely protects its own, but brutally excludes and intimidates those who don't quite fit in.
Locals are quick to blame a backpacker from South America (no-one seems to quite know which country) for the recent murder, and a tree-changer from the mainland who isn't quite blokey enough (he wears a cardigan) is also viewed with distrust, his property vandalised.
While Ayres was cautious about "banging the audience on the head" with it, running through the show's core is an undercurrent of Australian mateship and masculinity gone wrong.
"I don't think you can make a TV series in 2025 where two young women die without in some way reflecting on the preconditions of why that happens," he says.
"And certainly it's a theme that's very resonant in Australian society: why do men commit so many acts of violence against women?"
The impact of all this on men is explored too, as they bottle up their grief and emotion and replace it with anger, blame and violence.
Particularly moving is the portrait of Kieran's father Brian (Damien Garvey). After a full life as "a legend" with the "biggest pair of balls in the bay", Brian's now beset with early onset dementia, and relies on his wife to be his carer.
The Survivors is full of staggeringly beautiful shots of the Tasmanian coastline, tough-talking detectives and plenty of twists and turns.
But it's also a small-scale story of grief, growth, family and relationships, as the parents of Evelyn Bay begin to ask themselves: "Were we wrong about our sons?"
"Why did we make them squash all those lovely kind pieces of themselves, into something that we thought they should be," Verity wonders in the show's finale.
"What did we turn them into?"