Dustfall on ABC: Anna Torv leads taut crime drama that marries thematic gravity with genre thrills

Well-meaning Australian drama shows tend to have a familiar look, tone and theme – they’re gritty and sombre, often set in a small town, have a detective at the centre and a crime that reflects “who we are” as a nation.

After a few of these, it can get a little tiresome. But Dustfall, despite ticking all those above boxes, transcends the genre trappings.

Perhaps it’s Anna Torv’s central performance, a character whose tough-set jaw and steely interactions with suspects act as a smokescreen to hide her roiling emotions.

Or it’s the confident direction by Emma Freeman, who has previously worked with Torv on The Newsreader and Secret City. Also too, one of the writers, Belinda Chayko, had worked on Secret City.

It’s a reunion of these women who seem to bring out the best in each other in Dustfall. There’s a seamlessness to how the story is presented that despite its gravity, doesn’t feel onerous or like homework.

The six-episode is based on Vikki Petraitis’s 2022 novel The Unbelieved but has made changes to the lead character’s, Tig Pollard, storyline.

Tig is a detective sergeant who, after years working in Brisbane, returned to her hometown of North Gap, a town that’s small enough that people remember her from her school days but not so teeny that everyone knows each other.

One morning, an 18-year-old woman, Edie (Zoe Phillips), is discovered in the middle of a cane field, covered in bruises and with no memory of how she got there. A forensic exam reveals a brutal rape, and a large quantity of GHB in her system.

The crime against Edie brings to the surface regressive attitudes about sexual assault and rape – whether it’s the pub owner’s reluctance to aid the investigation, the school boys who make jokes and laugh during a plea for information, the dad who tells his teenage son that some girls have sex and then later regret it.

Even among Tig and forensic pathologist Shayna (Alice Ansara)’s school friends group, one of the middle-aged adult women mention how easy it is for young girls to just “make things up”.

It would be astonishing if it wasn’t so bleakly familiar. These are the narratives being played out all the time, whether in public or private, and it’s not confined to small towns either. Dustfall has a subplot involving a rape case Tig was previously involved in in the city, where the perpetrator was found not guilty.

That might sound all didactic, and on occasion, it does feel it, but for the most part, Dustfall weaves together these responses to an ugly, indisputable crime, and spotlights that even a “perfect” victim and hard evidence still leads to a community that can’t completely get behind the truth.

The show is also interested in exploring not just what one form of sexual assault – the drugged out young victim whose body is covered in forensics – but also those instances in which it is not immediately “obvious”.

Tig too has personal experience, having had a relationship with a much older musician when she was 16 years old, the murkiness of which her mother (Juliet Stevenson) and some of her old friends still aren’t awake to.

Across the six episodes, the story and character beats are well paced, and there are some red herrings thrown out for bait. It follows the path of a crime thriller, but it remains relatively unpredictable.

Torv’s performance is a big part of why Dustfall works. She continues to be one of the most compelling actors on Australian TV, and part of that seems to be this willingness to play her characters as they are, and not as someone who desperately needs the viewing audience to like them.

There’s a lack of vanity to her work, and that multi-dimensionality is why we’re so willing to follow those characters including Tig.

So, yes, Dustfall is trying to reflect where Australia is in terms of dealing with gendered violence (spoiler, we’re bad at it), but it’s a rare show that has managed to successfully package that social commentary and actual character depth within an entertaining crime thriller. These things do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Dustfall is streaming on ABC iview