The news that Jane Campion was debuting a new project at last month’s Sundance Film Festival was met with general excitement – until we all realized that the project was not a feature film, but a television miniseries that runs seven hours that would only be showed but once during the festival. Even if you’ve never been to a film festival, you can probably imagine how impossible it is to schedule a seven-hour chunk on any day, let alone just one set day. Fortunately, Campion’s Top of the Lake is a television series after all, and one that will be showing on the Sundance Channel next month.
The series features Elisabeth Moss as a detective tasked with returning to her close-knit (and more than a little dysfunctional) hometown, an isolated hamlet apparently filled with guns and drugs and people operating on a real hair-trigger. Moss’ Robin Griffin’s case is that of a missing girl – a twelve-year-old who also happens to be five months pregnant and who has disappeared after walking into a frozen lake. Campion’s trademark style and beauty are already on display in the series’ trailer, so just imagine how wonderful that will feel in one, big seven-hour dose. Watch the stunning trailer after the break.
Top of the Lake premieres on March 18th on the Sundance Channel. [Sundance Channel, via /Film]