Berlinale Bloggers 2020
Australia’s best film and TV franchise is back

The television continuation of the movie of the same name, Mystery Road premiered the first two episodes of its second season at this year’s Berlinale festival.

By Sarah Ward

Introducing the first two episodes of Mystery Road’s second season to the Berlinale audience, Australian filmmaker Warwick Thornton bubbles with visible excitement — and doesn’t hold back when it comes to the franchise’s place in Australia’s big- and small-screen landscape. “This is one of the most important things we’ve ever done,” theSamson and Delilah and Sweet Country director exclaims, particularly noting the show’s reach. When the series’ first season aired in 2018, it brought Indigenous storytelling into millions of Aussie households week after week.

Aaron Pedersen, the iconic Australian actor now synonymous with Mystery Road, is just as passionate. After starring in the 2013 film, its 2016 sequel Goldstone, and both seasons of the Mystery Road television series, he’s also keenly aware of the significance of Jay Swan, the no-nonsense Aboriginal detective that sits at the franchise’s centre. “He’s a character that has so many different layers to it, because I believe our history pre-colonisation ties into it,” he explains. “He has so much depth, so much backstory and so much forward journey.”

The pair’s enthusiasm is understandable. Making his first television project, Thornton is one of two directors behind Mystery Road’s second season, alongside Top End Wedding’s Wayne Blair. Seven years into playing Swan, Pedersen wears the franchise protagonist’s unflinching stare like a second skin. But this isn’t just a case of two artists simply sharing their immense pride about their work. As the franchise keeps establishing - including in its two new world-premiering episodes, ahead of a full six-episode season - Mystery Road is both Australia’s best and most significant screen property.

Another town, another troubling case

Mystery Road’s second season begins as all of its preceding chapters have: with a case needing Swan’s attention. When a headless corpse is found in the mangroves outside a remote Aussie town, he’s swiftly on the scene. While rookie cop Fran (Jada Alberts) is on Swan’s side, the detective makes few friends with his gruff, to-the-point ways - especially when his investigation leads him to a local bikie-led drug ring.

Also complicating matters is the excavation of a sacred Indigenous site on the edge of town, which Fran’s sister (Ngaire Pigram) is protesting, as well as the presence of two familiar faces from Swan’s past. 

More than just another police procedural

One of the ongoing joys of Mystery Road is its ability to spin its template-like setup in all manner of directions, all while adding extra shades and hues to its portrait of contemporary Australia. At its heart is a police procedural packaged as an outback noir - and even a western thanks to Australia’s rusty landscape and Swan’s ever-present hat, both of which get ample screen time under Thornton and Blair’s second-season direction - but this franchise continually finds new depths and relevance in its chosen scenarios. 

Indeed, when it was originally created for the big screen by Ivan Sen, Mystery Road drew inspiration from the writer/director’s own history, using real-life experiences as a launching pad to both depict and dissect race relations in Australia today. Each successive installment has continued in the same fashion, including the immensely gripping first two episodes of the TV series’ second season. “These are all vignettes of our lives as Aboriginal people,” Pedersen notes.