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The Guardian
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Survivors review – a murder mystery so intense you'll watch through your fingers
I hope you have had enough time to recover from Robyn Malcolm's barnstorming performance as a harrowed wife and mother labouring under burdens no one should have to endure in the acclaimed After the Party, because here comes another one. The Survivors is a six-part adaptation of Jane Harper's bestselling Australian crime novel of the same name, by Tony Ayres – who did the same for Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap 10 years ago, which followed families fracturing under the weight of a moment's lost control, and who wrote Stateless in 2020 about lives intertwining at an Australian immigration detention centre. This is a writer who doesn't shy away from the pain human beings can inflict on one other. The Survivors is technically a murder mystery but its real subject is grief and terrible, terrible guilt. Ayres noted in a publicity interview that he wouldn't dare start The Slap now as gently as he did then (it began with one of the characters easing into a seemingly ordinary day, by the end of which nothing would be easy again); the pressure to grab the audience immediately and hard is simply too great. Accordingly, we begin here at night with a teenage boy on the verge of drowning in the storm-lashed caves of his local bay. A boat crewed by his older brother and his friend comes riding out of the darkness, only to overturn at the last second. We cut to a funeral – the boy, Kieran (Ned Morgan) has survived but his brother Finn (Remy Kidd) and Finn's friend and crewman Toby (Talon Hooper) were killed. We then cut to the present day, 15 years on from the tragedy, as Kieran (played as an adult by Charlie Vickers) returns to Evelyn Bay after years of – only technically self-imposed – exile with his wife Mia (Yerin Ha) and their new baby, his parents' first grandchild. His father Brian (Damien Garvey) is now in the early stages of dementia and mistakes him for Finn. The air is thicker than ever with ghosts. His mother Verity (Robyn Malcolm) is seen in flashback berating young Kieran in his hospital bed for the death of his brother but here in the present busies herself with caring for Brian and making pass-agg remarks about Kieran and Mia's parenting skills. The atmosphere alone makes you want to watch from behind your fingers. In a small town there is no escape. Everyone knows who he is, everyone has an opinion about the degree of his culpability, none more so than the owner of the local pub, which is owned by Toby's father Julian (Martin Sacks) whose rage and sorrow has festered and been passed on to the son, Liam (Julian Weeks), Toby left behind. It is almost a relief when a corpse turns up on the beach to distract us all. But it is the body of Bronte (Shannon Berry), a young woman from out of town who had been researching the possible death of a third person that night 15 years ago. The drownings overshadowed the disappearance of teenager Gabby Birch (Eloise Rothfield) and Bronte was working with her mother Trish (Catherine McClements), giving as heartbreaking a performance as Malcolm to reignite interest in her case. Bronte was murdered and likely sexually assaulted. Her murder and the possible death/killing of Gabby pull the community into a fresh hell at the same time as resurrecting memories of the past. Clues are gathered, suspects are considered, tracked down, dismissed or arrested, and hopes, disappointments, red herrings and new possibilities abound as detectives try to reconstruct Bronte's time in Evelyn Bay and discover who she might have upset and how. Meanwhile, the labyrinthine connections among the townsfolk are gradually revealed, offering up new motives and ruling out others. But we also see how the competing interests among people and the vulnerabilities left by the storm leave them open to blackmail from and by one other – how do you refuse anything to someone you bereaved? – and witness statements are retracted or massaged, evidence is concealed and the situation becomes increasingly dark for Kieran and his family especially. The Survivors is a study in how raw grief and festering resentment warp everything – and how surviving a tragedy rarely means getting away unscathed. At its centre is the particular pain of the three mothers – Finn's, Bronte's and Gabby's – deprived of their children and for ever changed by it. Their suffering is almost palpable and marks The Survivors indelibly out from the murder mystery herd. The Survivors is on Netflix now.
Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
How a Lord of the Rings star ended up stranded in Tasmania
When Charlie Vickers steps onto the set of the multimillion-dollar The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power as the evil Sauron, it's usually after he has spent several hours in hair and make-up, where a long blond wig and a pair of pointy ears are attached and he's been kitted out in a black suit of armour. He then stands in front of a green screen, conjuring up Middle-earth or whatever fantasy element is part of that day's story (orcs, elves etc), and utters lines such as, 'Whether or not his repentance in the Second Age was genuine, he chose to do evil again.' For The Survivors, the six-part Tasmanian murder mystery adapted from Jane Harper's 2020 novel of the same name, it was an altogether different (and much less expensive) story. Think boardies, thongs and a baby mullet. 'I can just rock up to work,' admits a cheery Vickers over Zoom from his home in London. 'I can just drive my own car to the set, get out and walk into the make-up truck. Whereas on Lord of the Rings, you're having to scan a pass, and then someone else scans another pass, and it's a very different experience.' Loading Despite being Melbourne born and bred, The Survivors is only the 32-year-old's third production in Australia, after the film Palm Beach and the TV series The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. Unlike many Australian actors of his age, he didn't follow the usual path of Neighbours or Home and Away. Instead, he was accepted into London's prestigious Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, which meant he bypassed the local scene and landed, almost instantly, in the big time. 'I watched Neighbours religiously with my mum every night,' he says. 'Like, 6.30 it was The Simpsons on Channel 10 and then Neighbours. That's why I want to work more and more in Australia because you just inherently feel the connection to Australian stories, and because there's so much familiarity in these stories. 'There was a joy coming up in England, but actually, I genuinely wouldn't change that. The fact that I could go and watch Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in the West End on a Wednesday night, that kind of thing you only get in London. But I certainly missed how quintessentially Australian a lot of Australian projects are.' He made it his mission to seek out Australian projects that he could film between seasons of The Lord of the Rings, and it was while he was on holiday that The Survivors came knocking. Loading 'I was coming back to Melbourne with my wife and my then, maybe, eight-month-old baby,' he says. 'And I got this meeting for a character returning to his coastal hometown with his four-month-old and his wife. And I was like, 'Well, I can't not throw my hat in the ring for this. This is eerily similar.'' The baby thing, by the way, is why he is so at ease as a young dad in The Survivors. 'Yes,' he says, laughing. 'Lots of bouncing.' Written and executive produced by Tony Ayres, The Survivors follows Kieran Elliot (Vickers), who returns with his partner and child to his small coastal Tasmanian hometown of Evelyn Bay, 15 years after two young men drowned, and a teenage girl disappeared on the same day. Kieran's relationship with his parents – and the community – is still fractured, so when a woman's body washes up on the beach, old wounds reopen in a town that is not quite ready to forgive or forget. 'He's a man who has lived with, and is always living with, the grief of his past,' says Vickers of his character. 'He's been through a really traumatic event at a seminal moment of his life, and he has forever lived with the repercussions of it. Not run away from it, but tried to start afresh. And he is then thrust back into a lot of the trauma of his past, and has to deal with a lot of unresolved emotion and a lot of unresolved pain.' For Ayres, a prolific film and TV writer, director and producer, with credits such as The Slap, Stateless and Nowhere Boys to his name, he knew Vickers had the role as soon as he walked into the audition. 'The director Cherie Nowlan and I were doing auditions in Melbourne, and as soon as Charlie walked into the room, we just looked at each other and we knew,' says Ayres. 'We both knew at exactly the same time. '[The character] Kieran is not an alpha male. He's actually a good, decent person. And Charlie is such a good, decent human being – I mean, he's a wonderful actor as well – but there was something so essentially Charlie in Kieran and Kieran in Charlie, that it just became like, 'Oh, well, it's a no-brainer. Clearly this is the guy who was meant to play this role.' Charlie is a very fine, nuanced, detailed actor and he has genuine emotional range.' Although Kieran sits at the centre of the story, Ayers was also drawn to the women in Harper's book. 'There's a monologue that Bronte's mother gives in the book, and it is so powerful and sensational and speaks to an anger that mothers feel at these unconscionable losses,' says Ayers. 'And it reminded me of Women of Troy, something at the scale of Greek tragedy.' Loading Ayers was also mindful to not create another murder mystery where women are overwhelmingly both the victim and the source of entertainment. 'If you're going to do it, then you have to do it in a way which respects the woman who died,' he says. 'The last thing we wanted to do was make a piece that was about a dead woman as entertainment. Certainly, that wasn't Jane's intention in the book, and certainly that wasn't our intention in making the TV series. 'We wanted to be part of a bigger conversation, which I think we need to have as a society about gendered roles and the limitations and constrictions of what it might mean to be a man or a woman and how we might look at ways of broadening that so we don't push people to the most extreme and violent situations.' What also makes The Survivors stand out is that while it features a well-known older cast – Robyn Malcolm, Damien Garvey, Catherine McClements, Martin Sacks and Don Hany – most of the younger cast are relatively unknown or, like Vickers, have worked overseas more than they have in Australia. Yerin Ha, for example, who plays Kieran's partner Mia, has been cast as one of the leads in the next season of Bridgerton, but her local work is limited. 'We had early 30s and late 50s as the two key demographics,' says Ayres. 'So when you're casting those demographics … the famous names that we have in Australia tend to be in their early 50s. And that's the most recognisable talent pool, and we don't have as many names who are younger at the moment.' Loading Ayres thinks the reason many younger local actors are struggling to find recognition is the lack of feature films being made in Australia and then, conversely, the sheer amount of TV being made in general. 'The world that we live in is so noisy, there's so many shows,' says Ayres. 'It's harder for a show to break out. And unless a show breaks out, the actors don't become stars. Interestingly, I think we're seeing more stars coming from TV now – happily, Murray Bartlett came out of season one of The White Lotus – but there are relatively few breakout TV shows.'
The Age
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
How a Lord of the Rings star ended up stranded in Tasmania
When Charlie Vickers steps onto the set of the multimillion-dollar The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power as the evil Sauron, it's usually after he has spent several hours in hair and make-up, where a long blond wig and a pair of pointy ears are attached and he's been kitted out in a black suit of armour. He then stands in front of a green screen, conjuring up Middle-earth or whatever fantasy element is part of that day's story (orcs, elves etc), and utters lines such as, 'Whether or not his repentance in the Second Age was genuine, he chose to do evil again.' For The Survivors, the six-part Tasmanian murder mystery adapted from Jane Harper's 2020 novel of the same name, it was an altogether different (and much less expensive) story. Think boardies, thongs and a baby mullet. 'I can just rock up to work,' admits a cheery Vickers over Zoom from his home in London. 'I can just drive my own car to the set, get out and walk into the make-up truck. Whereas on Lord of the Rings, you're having to scan a pass, and then someone else scans another pass, and it's a very different experience.' Loading Despite being Melbourne born and bred, The Survivors is only the 32-year-old's third production in Australia, after the film Palm Beach and the TV series The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. Unlike many Australian actors of his age, he didn't follow the usual path of Neighbours or Home and Away. Instead, he was accepted into London's prestigious Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, which meant he bypassed the local scene and landed, almost instantly, in the big time. 'I watched Neighbours religiously with my mum every night,' he says. 'Like, 6.30 it was The Simpsons on Channel 10 and then Neighbours. That's why I want to work more and more in Australia because you just inherently feel the connection to Australian stories, and because there's so much familiarity in these stories. 'There was a joy coming up in England, but actually, I genuinely wouldn't change that. The fact that I could go and watch Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in the West End on a Wednesday night, that kind of thing you only get in London. But I certainly missed how quintessentially Australian a lot of Australian projects are.' He made it his mission to seek out Australian projects that he could film between seasons of The Lord of the Rings, and it was while he was on holiday that The Survivors came knocking. Loading 'I was coming back to Melbourne with my wife and my then, maybe, eight-month-old baby,' he says. 'And I got this meeting for a character returning to his coastal hometown with his four-month-old and his wife. And I was like, 'Well, I can't not throw my hat in the ring for this. This is eerily similar.'' The baby thing, by the way, is why he is so at ease as a young dad in The Survivors. 'Yes,' he says, laughing. 'Lots of bouncing.' Written and executive produced by Tony Ayres, The Survivors follows Kieran Elliot (Vickers), who returns with his partner and child to his small coastal Tasmanian hometown of Evelyn Bay, 15 years after two young men drowned, and a teenage girl disappeared on the same day. Kieran's relationship with his parents – and the community – is still fractured, so when a woman's body washes up on the beach, old wounds reopen in a town that is not quite ready to forgive or forget. 'He's a man who has lived with, and is always living with, the grief of his past,' says Vickers of his character. 'He's been through a really traumatic event at a seminal moment of his life, and he has forever lived with the repercussions of it. Not run away from it, but tried to start afresh. And he is then thrust back into a lot of the trauma of his past, and has to deal with a lot of unresolved emotion and a lot of unresolved pain.' For Ayres, a prolific film and TV writer, director and producer, with credits such as The Slap, Stateless and Nowhere Boys to his name, he knew Vickers had the role as soon as he walked into the audition. 'The director Cherie Nowlan and I were doing auditions in Melbourne, and as soon as Charlie walked into the room, we just looked at each other and we knew,' says Ayres. 'We both knew at exactly the same time. '[The character] Kieran is not an alpha male. He's actually a good, decent person. And Charlie is such a good, decent human being – I mean, he's a wonderful actor as well – but there was something so essentially Charlie in Kieran and Kieran in Charlie, that it just became like, 'Oh, well, it's a no-brainer. Clearly this is the guy who was meant to play this role.' Charlie is a very fine, nuanced, detailed actor and he has genuine emotional range.' Although Kieran sits at the centre of the story, Ayers was also drawn to the women in Harper's book. 'There's a monologue that Bronte's mother gives in the book, and it is so powerful and sensational and speaks to an anger that mothers feel at these unconscionable losses,' says Ayers. 'And it reminded me of Women of Troy, something at the scale of Greek tragedy.' Loading Ayers was also mindful to not create another murder mystery where women are overwhelmingly both the victim and the source of entertainment. 'If you're going to do it, then you have to do it in a way which respects the woman who died,' he says. 'The last thing we wanted to do was make a piece that was about a dead woman as entertainment. Certainly, that wasn't Jane's intention in the book, and certainly that wasn't our intention in making the TV series. 'We wanted to be part of a bigger conversation, which I think we need to have as a society about gendered roles and the limitations and constrictions of what it might mean to be a man or a woman and how we might look at ways of broadening that so we don't push people to the most extreme and violent situations.' What also makes The Survivors stand out is that while it features a well-known older cast – Robyn Malcolm, Damien Garvey, Catherine McClements, Martin Sacks and Don Hany – most of the younger cast are relatively unknown or, like Vickers, have worked overseas more than they have in Australia. Yerin Ha, for example, who plays Kieran's partner Mia, has been cast as one of the leads in the next season of Bridgerton, but her local work is limited. 'We had early 30s and late 50s as the two key demographics,' says Ayres. 'So when you're casting those demographics … the famous names that we have in Australia tend to be in their early 50s. And that's the most recognisable talent pool, and we don't have as many names who are younger at the moment.' Loading Ayres thinks the reason many younger local actors are struggling to find recognition is the lack of feature films being made in Australia and then, conversely, the sheer amount of TV being made in general. 'The world that we live in is so noisy, there's so many shows,' says Ayres. 'It's harder for a show to break out. And unless a show breaks out, the actors don't become stars. Interestingly, I think we're seeing more stars coming from TV now – happily, Murray Bartlett came out of season one of The White Lotus – but there are relatively few breakout TV shows.'
Daily Record
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Netflix's 'thrilling' new murder mystery should be your next binge-watch
Netflix is set to release this thrilling new murder mystery on June 6 and it's a must-see If you're on the hunt for a new murder mystery to dive into, Netflix's upcoming limited series The Survivors should be at the top of your list. Based on the best selling novel of the same name by Jane Harper, this thrilling whodunnit features suspense, emotional depth and haunting secrets that refuse to stay buried. The series is set in the moody seaside town of Evelyn Bay, according to Netflix The Survivors explores: "what happens to families and friends when they're forced to reckon with the kind of traumatic events that have a way of floating up to the surface again and again." The show will be available to stream on Netflix, from June 6 - make sure to add it to your watch list and turn notifications on. The six episode series follows Kieran Elliott (Charlie Vickers) and Mia Chang (Yerin Ha), a young couple who return to the fictional town where they grew up, 15 years after a devastating tragedy. Kieran is haunted by the events of his past, with the drowning of two friends and the mysterious disappearance of a young girl always in the back of his head. Now, back in Evelyn Bay and reuniting with his own family, Kieran finds that the ghosts of the past aren't finished with him yet. The synopsis reads: "When the body of a young woman is found on the beach, the town is once again rocked by tragedy and the investigation of her death threatens to reveal long-held secrets, the truth about the missing girl, and a killer among them." The cast features a compelling mix of new talent and established actors. Charlie Vickers, known for his role in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, portrays a haunted and complexed Kieran. While Yerin Ha, who's about to take a leading role in Bridgerton, plays Kieran's wife Mia. They are joined by Robyn Malcom (Heartbreak High) who plays Verity Elliott, Damien Garvey (The Artful Dodger) as Brain Elliot, Thom Green (Ladies in Black) will play Sean Gilroy and George Mason (Black Snow) will portray Ash Carter. Showrunner Tony Ayres, known for his work on Clickbait and Nowhere Boys, described the show as "a family melodrama disguised as a murder mystery" in an interview with Tudum. He continued: "Because the things that are really at its heart are things like a son wanting his mother's love and the mother who just cannot afford to give it because her whole world might fall apart." Speaking about the show and its themes, Tony says: "I often describe the show as a Trojan horse. It's a family melodrama disguised as a murder mystery. Because the things that are really at its heart are things like a son wanting his mother's love and the mother who just cannot afford to give it because her whole world might fall apart."
Boston Globe
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
This week's TV: Owen Wilson in ‘Stick,' George Clooney's Broadway show, and Cynthia Erivo hosts the Tony Awards
What else clicks this week? 1. ' The Survivors ,' Friday on Netflix: The insatiable appetite for crime thrillers has washed this Australian thriller to our shores. It's set in coastal Evelyn Bay, where the aftermath of a storm 15 years prior haunts those that remain. Survivors' guilt weighs heavily on Kieran (Charlie Vickers) and Mia (Yerin Ha) in the six-episode miniseries. Three died in the tragedy: Two men drowned, and the body of a young girl was found and assumed to have been a storm victim as well. But what if she didn't die from catastrophic weather? Now, when the police discover a murdered young woman, present fear and past trauma merge, uncovering long-buried secrets that may reveal the killer's identity and tear apart the close-knit community. Advertisement 2. ' The Belmont Stakes ,' Saturday on Fox Sports: The Saratoga Racecourse in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., will host the 157th running of the Belmont Stakes, the third jewel in horse racing's triple crown. 2025 Kentucky Derby winner Sovereignty is competing for the $2million purse with the Preakness Stakes winner (and Derby runner-up) Journalism. Advertisement 3. ' Good Night, and Good Luck ,' Saturday at 7 p.m. on CNN: The cable news network livestreams 4. ' 78th Annual Tony Awards ,' Sunday on CBS at 8 p.m. and streaming on Paramount+: Tony Award winner Cynthia Erivo makes for a 'Wicked' host for the Thelma Adams is a cultural critic and the author of the best-selling historical novel ' ,' about Josephine Marcus, the Jewish wife of Wyatt Earp.
