Deadloch gives Broadchurch’s mystery thriller formula a hilarious twist

The film opens with two First Nation teenagers stumbling upon a dead body on a deserted beach. In a neatly labeled house full of Post-it notes and Mason jars, two women try to engage in sexual activity while their dog, who is confused and distressed, watches. The scenes of the opening sequence are as follows: DeadlochKate McCartney created a new Australian black comedy murder mystery by Kate McLennan. Amazon Prime’s series establishes a world of queerness and murder with inept law enforcement. Senior Sgt. Dulcie Collins (Kate Box) and her team’s attempts to maintain order in Deadloch while unmasking a misandrist murderer.

Small-Town Murder Mysteries™ have become shorthand for prestige dramatic vehicles that showcase serious actors: True Detective, Fargo, Sharp Objects, Top of the LakeThen, Mare of EasttownAll boasted impressively expensive casting lists, and received their share of award love. It’s not difficult to track the genre’s constructs: emotionally damaged detectives who struggle to work together, an idyllic community that harbors a dark and damaging secret, a serial killer always one step ahead of the law. They have their roots in Nordic Noir, and they were popularized by a British breakout series BroadchurchThe Kates were deeply affected by the Kates’ experiences during Deadloch’s development. For eight years, they refined their show (whose working title was aptly “Funny Broadchurch”) into a gut-busting, politically sharp takedown of a genre full of unchallenged misogyny, heteronormativity, and copaganda.

Deadloch, a sleepy Tasmanian village located under Australia’s Land Down Under shares very little in common with other Australian towns. The town itself is rapidly gentrifying, the recent influx of queer couples directly challenging the locals’ regressive (read: sexist and homophobic) views. Everyone agrees that cops are useless. Deadloch’s police aren’t the typical moral and just paragons that you see in the genre. Instead, they slackly issue parking tickets and try to coax bridge seals away. And when fitness bro Trent Latham’s (Barry Wheeler) body washes ashore, the task of determining what happened is thrust upon people typically victimized within these narratives: type-A lesbian Dulcie, naive true-crime junkie Abby (Nina Oyama), Gay and Tired delegator Sven (Tom Ballard), and crass, out-of-town female detective Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami). Dulcie, her team and their ill-equipped outsiders are the only ones who can stop the unfathomable fate of men in the town.

Image: Prime Video

Image: Prime Video

Every episode is an alchemy of drama, character interaction, and pitch black comedy, all of which are used to critique the murder mystery genre. Eddie is parodying the archetype of Outsider Detective, an alcoholic slob who takes no care about personal hygiene or closed-toe shoes in order to tramp through town illegally and gather evidence. He wants to go home as quickly as possible to Darwin.

Her relationship with Dulcie, whom she refers to as “Horsehair,” is less of a partnership and more of a nuisance. Eddie’s hairbrained theories obstructs and delays the investigation. Although she eventually grows out of it, her willful incompetence is frustrating at times — she consistently shoots down the possibility of a serial killer in favor of a “Dead Cunt Football Drug Ring.” Thankfully, her sheer lunacy coupled with Sami’s charming if slimy performance makes her engrossing to watch.

Dulcie, alternatively, feels plucked from a cookie-cutter whodunit: a technologically inept control freak who’s a sucker for the chain of command. As a former detective, Dulcie understands the trauma of murder better than anyone else in Deadloch, but none of the civilians take her seriously — some because she’s police, others because she’s a lesbian. Box plays straight woman to all the crazy characters around her, despite being queer. The friction between Dulcie’s terseness and Eddie’s boorishness propels much of the humor and tension in the season’s early episodes.

This series’ tonal shifts are what make it so compelling. Every giggle or gasp, working together with each other to bring out something much more real and human that a strictly dramatic show could never hope to achieve. The townsfolk’s sunburnt resilience makes them more realistic — they aren’t beaten down enough by the murders to stop their bickering, scheming, and communal gossiping, nor their signature Winter Feastival (a massive tourist event filled with food and bizarre art exhibitions). Life goes on despite the deaths.

It’s possible the townsfolk don’t mind because they feel inherently better off with these men gone. Trent is not mourned by the townspeople because he was a drunkard and sexist. You can also read more about much — they raise their glass (twice) and plan to forget about him before it’s emptied. Deadloch isn’t really about its victims; it’s about the living, who return from a brief, bloody distraction back to their lives under the patriarchy. The problems of toxic masculinity, performative feminism, colonialism, homophobia, and unjust power dynamics don’t die with their perpetrators. In the face of existential angst caused by the unfair and unbalanced world around us, the Kates understand that there’s only one thing we can do: look it right in the face and laugh.