New Australian dramas Last Seen and the second season of High Country lead this week’s selection of streaming releases, alongside reality series Apocalypse, a documentary about furniture salesman Franco Cozzo and the acclaimed films Scrapper and Bouchra.
Last Seen, Apple TV’s first Australian production, follows Ian, played by Patrick Brammall, whose daughter Maggie disappeared 11 years earlier. When he receives a triple-zero call while on duty, he becomes convinced that she is alive.
The six-part thriller has the essential ingredients of a tense missing-person drama. Ian is a former police officer whose grief has cost him his job and marriage, while the search takes him through Victoria’s ominous rainforests. The cast includes Brendan Cowell, Daniel Henshall and Maxine Peake.
Yet the series repeatedly dissipates its own suspense with slow flashbacks and abrupt diversions. The central mystery is also largely resolved for viewers by the second episode, leaving the remaining instalments to prolong revelations that would move more swiftly in a crime novel.
Brammall gives Ian a convincing sense of a man hollowed out by loss, but the drama’s emotional intensity can overwhelm its momentum. The police call that sets the story in motion does not arrive until the end of the second episode, reinforcing a sense of stasis rather than urgency.
High Country returns to Victoria’s Alps
High Country: What Lies Beneath offers a more assured return to the fictional Victorian town of Brokenridge. Leah Purcell reprises her role as Andie Whitford, an instinctive detective investigating a growing number of deaths while attempting to uncover her Indigenous heritage.
Having been raised without a connection to Country, Whitford faces hostility from old and new enemies. Her ally, retired sergeant Dyson, is accused of corruption by a new detective, played by Brendan Cowell, while the investigation draws in a millionaire technology entrepreneur among a crowded field of suspects.
The second season balances its twists with a confident visual style and a tightly controlled plot. Three of its eight episodes were available for review.
Apocalypse, a new reality series narrated by Jonathan LaPaglia, places British and Australian contestants in a post-apocalyptic settlement for 28 days. They must cope without food, electricity or running water, with groups competing for limited resources.
The contestants include cab drivers, content creators, cattle farmers and a self-described princess who works as a psychologist. Its format is an unusual mixture of survival television and housemate-based reality, with rules that can be difficult to follow, but its first four episodes are presented as compelling viewing.
Palazzo Di Cozzo provides a warm portrait of the Melbourne furniture retailer and television personality Franco Cozzo, whose multilingual commercials and distinctive pronunciation of Footscray made him a familiar local figure. Madeleine Martiniello’s documentary, filmed over four years and released in 2021, also places his story within the postwar wave of Italian migration to Australia.
On SBS On Demand, Scrapper stars Lola Campbell as Georgie, a girl in London’s East End who meets her young, troubled father after her mother dies. Charlotte Regan’s debut is a bright black comedy with deliberately rough edges, inspired by Taika Waititi’s Boy but distinct in tone and story.
Bouchra, available on Mubi, follows a lesbian Moroccan filmmaker in a Prada coat travelling between New York and Casablanca and through time. The animated autofiction, created by Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani, uses jagged 3D imagery and an unconventional, neon-lit world to explore the tensions between the identities of its protagonist and her ambition to make a film about them.
