Top of the Lake: Jane Campion’s paradise has trouble aplenty

Pick of the day: Top of the LakeBBC UKTV, 10.15pm.

David Wenham and Elisabeth Moss in Top of the Lake on BBC UKTV at 10.15pm.

A YOUNG girl in a school uniform slowly walks into the freezing waters of an alpine lake framed by a seemingly untouched landscape. She seems strangely curious. The scene is ethereal and oddly enchanting, even though we suspect she is walking to her death.

This is how Jane Campion starts her award-winning six-hour miniseries about a mystery that consumes a community in a remote, incestuous town called Laketon in New Zealand.

Campion directs this episode, sharing overall duties for the series with Australian director Garth Davis and the writing honours with former collaborator Gerard Lee. Executive producers are Academy Award winners Emile Sherman and Iain Canning of See-Saw Films (The King’s Speech), and the series is a joint production between Britain’s BBC2, UKTV in Australia and New Zealand, and Sundance Channel in the US.

Campion’s haunting opening to her drama suggests paradise has a dark side. The term “noir mystic” comes to mind and in some ways the series really explores the notion of transgression.

After the 12-year-old girl is rescued, it is discovered she is pregnant and the police are called. When asked by authorities to name the man responsible, she writes on a piece of paper, “no one’’. Then she disappears into the forest, or has she been murdered?

She is Tui (Jacqueline Joe), daughter of the local drug lord, the louche and casually violent Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan).

As the local cops, led by the affably ineffectual Senior Sergeant Al Parker (David Wenham), head of the Queenstown police station, prevaricate, social services track down detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss), who is visiting her sick mother (Robyn Nevin) in Queenstown. She’s an expert in child protection and soon becomes obsessed with the search for Tui.

If initially a little out of her depth, she’s soon sucked back into the intrigues of a community she had hoped to forget.