Troubled Waters

 

- Rebecca Mahoney

It’s a grey and gloomy morning on Sydney’s Bondi Beach, where Elisabeth Moss is studying the grisly contents of a large, battered suitcase that has been dumped in the sand.

TV Times has joined the crowd of surfers and sun-seekers watching the actress as she shoots a scene for haunting crime drama Top of the Lake, which returns to BBC2 this week for a second, six-part run.

Created by writer-director Jane Campion, it picks up four years after the first, New Zealand-set series, and finds Elisabeth’s tortured detective, Robin Griffin, living in Sydney and hoping to reconnect with the child she gave up for adoption, Mary, who is played by Jane’s daughter Alice Englert. However, when the body of an unidentified Asian woman is found in a suitcase on Bondi, Robin soon becomes wrapped up in the city’s underbelly of sex trafficking and prostitution as she tries to unravel the murder-mystery of ‘China Girl’.