Black Snow

What if a time capsule, buried many years ago, contained a clue to a long-unsolved murder? This is the darkly entertaining premise underpinning Stan’s six-part original series Black Snow: a mostly well-made murder mystery that starts strong but runs out of gas as it approaches its twist-filled ending.Black Snow Season 1 Download.

Ziggy Ramo on Black Snow, Anzac Day and his Q+A controversy: ‘I was like, I’ve broken the Matrix!’The narrative is based in 1994 and 2019, the former timeline allowing the screenwriters (creator Lucas Taylor, Boyd Quakawoot and Beatrix Christian) and directors (Sian Davies and Matthew Saville) to give agency to their 17-year-old victim Isabel (Talijah Blackman-Corowa).The latter is an “opening old wounds” trajectory in which Travis Fimmel’s sleepy-eyed detective, James Cormack, attempts to solve the case and fleece a small town of its secrets. Isabel is first seen in dramatic early vision, running through a burning cane field. After jumping forward in time, Cormack is introduced in a more innocuous way: at a pub, operating a claw machine.

But things get weird when he does an Edward Norton from Flight Club, asking a bloke to punch him in the face and “put your bloody hips into it”. This moment adds another kind of mystery: what the hell is wrong with this guy? Without that scene, Cormack’s weary demeanour and thousand-yard stare would be interpreted as just another detective who’s lethargic and/or overworked; with it, we wonder whether there’s something untoward or perverse going on.Cormack’s boss agrees to assign him to the case, on the proviso he won’t complain about the Queensland heat – signposting the show as belonging to a genre I call the “bugger me dead, it’s hot” action/thriller (Stan delivered a great one last year in The Tourist).Upon arrival at the cop shop in the town of Ashford, the local senior sergeant (played by the under-used Kym Gyngell) delivers him a bloody-strayan greeting: “So, you’re the finger up my arsehole.” But he is mostly obliging.