Frances Grant: Persil cult won't wash

The Cult has gotten off to a shaky start. Photo / Supplied

If you went down to the dark scary woods with the opening epsiode of The Cult last week , you were in for much puzzlement but no big surprise.

The ambitious new local drama opened with a fierce determination to baffle and threaten. So busy was it being spooky and mysterious, it barely managed to be anything else.

The Cult has joined the telly drama fad for weirdness that keeps the audience endlessly guessing a la the interminable Lost. And so beset is it by this cryptic condition, it seems to be suffering from severe inflammation of the plot.

Keeping the dialogue minimal and the characterisation hazy, it whizzed through its set-up, with a faceless instigator sending out mystery envelopes with a code, which somehow alerted a disparate bunch of strangers that their missing family members were living in the closed Northland branch of an international cult. Next thing the relatives were gathered in a house in the deepest darkest bush, arguing with each other how to deliver their loved ones from the clutches of evil. As we haven't had a chance to get to know them, it's hard to care.

We know the cult is up to something right from the start, thanks to that nasty opening sequence of Dr Mengele ... sorry Dr Cynthia Ross (Danielle Cormack), injecting a constrained and terrified bloke in the eyeball.

This rather undercut the scenes that aimed to establish the attraction of the cult and the charisma of its American leader.

There is much joyous mass chanting about "bountiful love" and the clothing is so dazzlingly laundered you might think this is a church devoted to worshipping Persil and the front-loader. How much stronger, dramatically, if this had been in reverse, with the cult's sinister side revealed, rather than announced first up.

The show's set-up indicates it will move from one character's story to another. The hero for now is criminal defence lawyer Michael Lewis (Renato Bartolomei), gunned down by a bereaved mother in the opening scenes in what no doubt will be one of the many tangential subplots. Back in the main thrust, he's the estranged father of two brothers caught up in the Cult.

The other would-be rescuers include a couple from England, feuding sisters-in-law and some other blokes whose names I didn't quite catch.

In another bit of illogical sequencing, it's unclear why the group have come all this way in search of their loved ones, but don't just go to the police. It's not until Lewis runs up against the cult heavies, that he's warned if he goes to the authorities, his sons will die.

It's early days for The Cult and amid the confusion there is the makings of a good intrigue. But so far the show has been so preoccupied with establishing that things are not what they seem, it's hard to latch on to anything much.

Yes, there are endless shots of mysterious machinations by anonymous plotters, much aerial footage of the bush looking creepy and a dead body. As well as the cult, and the band of liberators, an angry backwoodsman and a mystery naked woman were thrown in for good measure. But with no ordinariness as contrast to the weirdness, it all comes across as simply over-the-top.

The Cult would be more powerful for a lighter foot on the gas. Enigma is best delivered sure and slow.

The Cult screens on TV2, 8.30pm tonight.