This adaptation of the bestselling Australian crime novel is full of twists, turns and red herrings. Its focus on the terrible grief of bereaved mothers makes it a cut above
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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 co-created 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.
