A Remarkable Place to Die review: stunning and safe

For some people, some places are just bad news. For New Zealand cop turned Sydney detective Anaís Mallory (Chelsie Preston Crayford), in A Remarkable Place to Die, it’s her hometown. Queenstown might look scenic and peaceful, but her memories of the place she once called home are all bad, starting with the murder of her father.

It’s a crime that’s (supposedly) solved, with two men in jail over his death. She left town not long afterwards, but her sister Lynne (Tara Canton) stayed. Now she’s dead too, killed in a car accident two years ago. Their deaths are enough to bring Anais back to her mother (Rebecca Gibney) and Queenstown as the town’s lead detective. No prizes for guessing which recent death is getting her full attention.

But it’s not her sister’s car that (very impressively) goes off a cliff at the start of the first episode. While Anais is flying in and getting set up at her mother’s house, someone is being flung around inside a tumbling car as it bounces down a very long and steep hillside.

When Anais is handed the case, she quickly discovers it’s not yet another straightforward accident on a notoriously dangerous road. The man inside had been dead for days: looks like she’s starting out her new job investigating a murder.

A Remarkable Place to Die: safe

An Australian / NZ co-production for the 9Network (and international partners), A Remarkable Place to Die is about as safe a bet as you can get when it comes to local drama. The basic set-up – a detective returns to their small home town after years away to investigate a crime that will dredge up their past – is the basis for countless crime dramas, from The Dry to Return to Paradise (and that’s just locally).

ScreenHub: Force of Nature: The Dry 2 review – no damp squib

That’s not a problem, by the way: if we want our commercial networks to be making scripted drama (we do) then they’re going to be making the kinds of drama that play it safe and bring in big audiences. And with this series rapidly establishing all the usual touchstones, crime fans will soon feel very much at home.

There’s a pair (one experienced, one fresh-faced) of junior cops (Roimata Fox and Dahnu Graham) who’ll be doing the legwork, a prickly detective (Matt Whelan) who’ll be working alongside Anais and providing regular tension – the romantic tension comes from pathologist Ihaka (Alex Tarrant) – and a chief (Lynette Forday) who’ll be dispensing world-weary wisdom and the occasional reminder of how the world really works when someone gets a little carried away with their own personal vendettas.

Speaking of personal, Anais soon runs into her former bestie, Maja (Indiana Evans), who somewhat awkwardly is now married to Anais’ former fiancée, Luke Staunton (Charles Jazz Terrier). Luke has stayed close to Anais’ mother, and is quite the mover and shaker in the small town, so when Anais starts to stir up trouble the pushback against her is going to be coming from inside the house.

But back to that tumbling car. Alongside the season-long subplots, A Remarkable Place to Die is a 90-minute mystery-of-the-week, so the murder she’s investigating rapidly turns up a string of suspects (and an extra corpse).

Future episodes feature a body found in an abandoned gold mine where the victim somehow swallowed the key that could have set them free, a double homicide where the first victim fell out of the sky onto the second, and a fireworks expert who gets a little too close to his exploding equipment.

A Remarkable Place to Die: mystery

The extended run time provides plenty of room for each episode to work as both a stand-alone mystery and another step on Anais’ search for answers (and that’s when the two aren’t intertwined). The result is enjoyably fast-moving on both tracks, keeping the pace up and the twists coming at a relatively rapid rate.

And while the stand-alone mysteries are solid for what they are, it’s the bigger mystery of what happened to Anais’ father and sister that has some real meat on the bone.

Preston Crayford is a charming lead who’s a firm centre for the series, while it’s the supporting cast (mostly Gibney and Terrier at first) whose roles give them a bit more to chew on. Queenstown looks stunning, which is more important than you might think; if you ever find your attention wandering, rest assured the next scene will feature a location straight out of a travel brochure or architectural digest (even when it’s meant to be the seedy side of town).

The occasional hint of NZ culture aside, there’s absolutely nothing groundbreaking happening across these four episodes, but as a firmly traditional crime series A Remarkable Place to Die has no problems delivering on the basics. ‘Likable cops solve mysteries in a gorgeous location while a slightly sinister subplot plays out in the background’ is a thriving genre for a reason: it’s nice to see at least one of our commercial networks getting in on the action.

A Remarkable Place to Die is broadcast on Channel 9, Sundays 8PM, and streaming on 9Now.