The citizens of Kettering, Tasmania might well feel ambivalent about Foxtel's new drama The Kettering Incident, budgeted at $14 million and shot on location. A small coastal town just south of Hobart, Kettering looks like an attractive spot for a weekend getaway, but the same cannot be said of the fictionalised setting of the show, imagined by head writer Victoria Madden and her team as an insular community full of secrets.

Taking its cue from recurrent accounts of UFO sighting in the Kettering area, the show has an uncanny mood from the outset. Ari Wegner's cinematography evokes a world where perceptions are not always reliable, where the sombre landscape looms inescapably while close-up details slide in and out of focus. The dominant colours are grey, green, and blue – dolomite cliffs, forested hills, clouded skies. Against this backdrop touches of brightness leap out at the viewer, such as the hooded red jacket worn by Gillian Baxter (Miranda Bennett), one of two teenage girls seen at the start of the first episode riding their bikes into the woods.