Top Of The Lake

Despite the formidable technical mastery applied and the demanding sprawl of the multifaceted narrative, Campion's series has the unmistakable timbre of daring art made naturally.

Top of the Lake [is] gorgeous and ambiguous and gripping like a hallucination.

This six-part series is so layered and unexpected that nothing follows a tried-and-true formula.... This is great TV.

Top of the Lake is Jane Campion and her cast at the top of their game.

Top of the Lake is rivetingly odd, almost oppressively atmospheric and thoroughly entrancing.

This haunting New Zealand miniseries boasts a strong, tense performance from Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss as a detective, but it's very much the work of director Jane Campion. [25 Mar 2013, p.44]

Top of the Lake presents a dire portrait of the human condition, very much in line with many of the other most popular crime-and-family-driven television series of recent years. It’s also right up there with the best of them.

This is an absolute: Top of the Lake is great.

The mystery of just what happened to the child unspools almost languidly against the backdrop of wild and gorgeous New Zealand country. The ugliness of humans amid such beauty resounds like a cold slap.

Numerous story strands--Robin’s dark past, the venomous Mitcham and his ne’er-do-well sons, a New Age women’s camp run by the mysterious guru GJ (Holly Hunter)--all coalesce into a taut and provocative thriller about damage, vengeance, and escape.

By rooting Top of the Lake in the real, Campion gives her more fanciful inspirations legs, and the mystery--which is, needless to say, not merely or even mostly the mystery of a missing girl--room to breathe. I have no idea where any of it's headed. But I am going along.

Creepy and cockeyed, unholy and unnerving, Top Of The Lake is riveting stuff.

A stunning, richly textured, feminist existential epic.

The narrative is so intense and the details are so rich that you can forget to breathe.

The miniseries is full of striking characters, some brutish and scary, others vulnerable with painful secrets.

After the forced setup, evolves into a rich portrait of hard lives and the possibility of healing. By episode 3, the miniseries feels like a smart crime novel, steeped in very specific locales and individuals.

Top of the Lake doesn’t fully get rolling for a while. Happily, Moss doesn’t let us become disinterested.

If you've seen "The Killing," you may think you've already seen some version of the story that filmmaker Jane Campion is telling in the Sundance Channel's new miniseries, Top of the Lake, but I promise you, you haven't.

Top of the Lake is reminiscent of AMC's The Killing in ways both good (its moodiness) and unfortunate--Robin has a fiancé back home who keeps pleading for her to return--but its world is so specific and transcendently trippy, haunted by mythic legends rooted in this unforgiving geography, that it feels wondrously fresh, alien and unforgettable.

It’s mainly an intelligent crime drama, and a real step forward for Sundance, which is bringing more original programming to its slate. As slow as it seems to go at first, you’ll be surprised at how quickly you’re addicted.

Top of the Lake is [not] free of idiosyncratic digressions and the occasionally odd segue, but it does a critically important thing very well: It draws you into a specific world and it quickly makes that world's textures, relationships and stakes matter.

Taken altogether--the determined detective, the drug lord, the kooky encampment, the mystery of Tui's disappearance--Top of the Lake makes for a compelling mix of moody, character-driven drama.

Developments are doled out at a measured clip, and the filmmakers seem less interested in sustaining forward momentum than in painting a vivid panorama of this broken community, a town cloaked in a dark and vaguely incestuous malaise.

Twists that are genuinely surprising, plus quirky humor, separate Top of the Lake from, say, AMC’s “The Killing,” which was also deliberately paced but unrelentingly dour as well.

Like Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, the paranoid screenplays of Andrew Niccol, and the absurdist horror of Black Sheep (an ovine analog of The Birds), it gets beneath the skin by examining the state of isolation at the bottom of the world.