The Kettering Incident

Season 1 BBC First (*119) 20:00 & 21:00 Supernatural thriller Something odd is happening in Aussie supernatural thriller series The Kettering Incident (2016-current). The eightpart show was filmed in Tasmania and centres on a woman and the two cases she’s mysteriously linked to after two teens go missing 15 years apart in the small Australian town of Kettering.

London-based doc Anna Macy (Elizabeth Debicki, Jed in thriller The Night Manager, 2016) left Kettering as a teen after her friend Gillian Baxter (Miranda Bennett) went missing while the girls were riding their bikes in the Forbidden Forest. Anna was found eight hours later covered in blood and all that she remembered was flashing lights in the woods. Back in the present day, Anna is still suffering blackouts and Elizabeth says that being an actress is very similar to Anna’s situation. “Strangely, what I found most relatable to Anna is that sense of her being bound between two worlds but not knowing who she is,” Liz says, adding that an actor’s life is an odd existence. “It surprises you how removed you can feel from reality.”

In episode 1 (31 August), Anna wakes up in a rental car in Kettering – worlds away from her blackout three days earlier in London. And she’s blamed when another teenager goes missing by the end of the episode. According to Liz, the main theme of the show is the idea that “the thing that most scares you is the thing you are most drawn to – like a moth to a flame”. Cinematographer Ari Wegner reveals that using camera tricks added to the mini-series’s mysterious feel. “I filmed certain scenes as if things were in Anna’s crosshairs, in the centre of the frame,” Ari says ominously. “Moving slowly, we give an illusion of something being pulled toward Anna. That creates tension for the viewers…”