What to stream this week: Patrick Brammall’s home-grown thriller, plus five more picks

This week’s picks include two new Australian dramas – Last Seen, which sends Patrick Brammall and Brendan Cowell on a chase through the Victorian high country, plus season two of Leah Purcell’s High Country. Also streaming this week is the new reality series Apocalypse, a documentary about the iconic furniture retailer Franco Cozzo and the delightful drama Scrapper.

Last Seen ★★

After the emotional cramp that was Amazon Prime Video’s The Runner, where Gal Gadot played a woman sprinting across London in a dull, drab attempt to find her kidnapped son, I was hopeful Last Seen would hit all the hallmarks of the Taken sub-genre.

There was promise; the six-part series is Apple TV’s first Australian production, and the next in their stream of new thrillers this year alone, ranging from slick (Lucky), to the overwrought (Cape Fear) and funny (Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed), but always engaging.

The premise is immediate: 11 years after his daughter Maggie went missing, triple-zero operator Ian (Colin From Accounts co-creator Patrick Brammall) receives a call on-duty and is immediately convinced it’s her.

Stopping at nothing to find her, Ian – a former cop who lost his job and marriage in the haze of grief – is soon chasing after cars, roughing up teens for leads and casing suspects up down and through Victoria’s dense, foreboding rainforests that made an eerie backdrop in The Dry 2. Add in an ensemble filled with actors able to tap into intense, dark depths – including Daniel Henshall (Snowtown), Brendan Cowell (Plum) and Maxine Peake (Say Nothing) – and Last Seen has all the ingredients for a gripping thriller.

Strange, then, for Last Seen to continually undercut its tension with sluggish flashbacks and poorly placed left-turns just as a scenario is building. There is also, fundamentally, no mystery within the show’s six episodes, with the who and why established for the audience by the second episode. That is a carry over from its source material, US crime-novelist Ryan David Jahn’s The Dispatcher, which establishes early if Maggie is alive and, if she is, who kidnapped her. But an airport thriller is a fast, furious read, while Last Seen’s script from Kris Mrksa stretches out these non-relevations.

That might work for some people. It certainly gives Brammall a lot to work with to establish how hollowed-out Ian is by Maggie’s disappearance, a crack often making it through to his voice.

But if The Runner lacked any emotion, Last Seen might be overwhelmed by it. Take the pilot, which opens with the discovery of a toddler’s body that the audience knows – via the show’s well-publicised premise – cannot be Maggie’s. Of course, there’s immense pain witnessing Ian and now ex-wife Debbie (Jessica Wren) find a false resolution, with the latter hoping to lay her daughter (and grief) to rest while Ian fixates on revenge.

That the dispatch call doesn’t arrive until the end of episode two is indicative of Last Seen’s reluctance to move forward – a stasis that mirrors Ian, but isn’t particularly interesting to watch.

High Country ★★★ (Binge)

Last Seen could have looked north to High Country for inspiration – a satisfying, well-studied crime drama set in the misty Victorian Alps and starring veteran Leah Purcell as Andie Whitford, a grizzled, instinctual detective.

Proving popular in the UK, its first season was a solid serve of Australian noir, where Whitford relocates from Melbourne to the isolated (fictional) town of Brokenridge, where several people have disappeared. Working with a retired sergeant Dyson (Ian McElhinney), Andie investigates the town’s criminal underbelly, intertwined with her own adoption.

While not particularly inventive, High Country’s first season was visually glossy and propulsive, with a taut script (from co-creators Marcia Gardner and John Ridley, plus Beck Cole) that trusted its audience to follow clues and double-crossing.

Subtitled What Lies Beneath, High Country’s second season dives deeper into Brokenridge and Whitford, who hopes to discover her Mob, having been raised with no connection to Country. As bodies begin pile up, Whitford could be next, with old and new foes alike wanting her gone, while new detective Gilmore (Brendan Cowell, shady but not as overzealous as in Last Seen) says her ally Dyson is corrupt.

Of the three of eight episodes available for review, High Country: What Lies Beneath is assured, confident television, balancing its many twists and corkboard of suspects (including Ryan Corr as a tech bro millionaire).

Palazzo Di Cozzo ★★★ (DocPlay)

Melburnians aged over 35 years old need no introduction to Franco Cozzo – the sleek, suited fixture of local TV who spruiked his baroque Sicilian furniture for decades with low-fi, tri-lingual commercials and his unique pronunciation of “Footiscray”. For the uninitiated, there’s Palazzo Di Cozzo, a warm, well-crafted portrait by Madeleine Martiniello released in 2021, two years before Cozzo’s death at age 88. Filmed over four years, the doco delights in the salesman’s eccentricities but contextualises his story within the post-World War II migration wave, establishing that Cozzo’s joys and struggles as an Italian-Australian were far more ordinary than the man himself.

Apocalypse ★★★★ (Binge)

It’s the end of the world in this entertaining, slightly confusing reality show narrated by Jonathan LaPaglia that lets loose a bunch of Brits and Australians for 28 days in a post-apocalyptic town – allegedly a top-secret military training base. Cabbies, content creators, cattle farmers and a self-described “princess” psychologist are among the survivors who form two warring groups fighting for resources. They’re very well cast. A strange blend of Alone, Big Brother and a nonsensical Mr. Beast video, Apocalypse’s rules are ill-defined and odd. But the four episodes offered for review enthralled me all the same.

Scrapper ★★★ (SBS On Demand)

While a winner at Sundance, Scrapper was overshadowed by Aftersun – the blistering 2022 semi-autobiographical debut from Charlotte Wells about a pre-teen girl on holiday at a Turkish resort with her young, troubled dad (Paul Mescal). Arriving a year later, Scrapper is also a debut by a UK filmmaker named Charlotte (Regan) about pre-teen Georgie meeting her young, troubled dad (Harris Dickinson) for the first time after her mum dies. Inspired by Taika Waititi’s Boy, it’s otherwise entirely different: a bright black comedy with endearingly rough edges, much like its characters.

Bouchra ★★★★ (Mubi)

A lesbian Moroccan coyote filmmaker in a Prada coat travels through time and between New York and Casablanca in this beguiling animated autofiction with jagged, rudimentary 3D-visuals made with Blender – the same open-source software used for last year’s Oscar-winning Flow. The debut feature from duo Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani, Bouchra’s anthropomorphic, neon-soaked world is jarring even before an early coyote-cow sex scene. But as its protagonist (voiced by and based on Bennani) struggles to make a film about how her identities alienate and liberate, Bouchra’s oddities gain a potent weight.

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