Essie Davis

In ordinary Somerset County, a young farm girl named Fern rescues the runt of a litter of pigs from her father's ax. Fern names the pig Wilbur, takes care of him, and continues to visit him every day after he is moved to her Uncle Homer Zuckerman's barn across the road. But it's Wilbur's friendship with Charlotte the spider that ultimately saves him from the "smoke house" when Charlotte's talent for weaving praiseworthy words about Wilbur into her...

Amelia is a single mother plagued by the violent death of her husband on the night she gave birth to her son. When a disturbing storybook called Mister Babadook turns up at her house, she is forced to battle with her son's deep-seated fears of the world around him, and together they must conquer it even as the monster disrupts reality and her tentative hold on sanity.

Our lady sleuth, Miss Phryne Fisher, sashays through the back lanes and jazz clubs of late 1920's Melbourne, fighting injustice with her pearl-handled pistol and her dagger sharp wit.

17-year-old Griet must work to support her family, so she becomes a maid in the house of Johannes Vermeer, where she attracts the master painter's attention. He is commissioned to paint Griet, and the result is one of the greatest paintings ever created.

Medical students assembled for an anatomy lecture are shocked to find the cadaver they expected is actually the fresh corpse of one of their professors. The mystery deepens after a valuable 16th-century manuscript belonging to the professor vanishes. Now estranged, Phryne and Jack step around each other as they investigate.

Phryne goes for a fitting at an exclusive fashion salon and finds that another customer has been killed with her own hairpin. It's the latest in a series of disasters for the salon, but Phryne finds that while haute couture is facing hard times, another profit-making enterprise is on the rise.

A séance to contact a soldier killed in World War I leads to two murders in Melbourne a decade after the war's end. Despite the claims of the spiritualist conducting the séance, Phryne prefers to rely on the memories of three army veterans to find out what really happened on the battlefield in France.

A vineyard owner hires Phryne to look into a suspicious death, but by the time she gets to the remote town, he's dead, too. The locals are hostile to her inquiries, especially the town's police sergeant, and Phryne calls a certain detective inspector from Melbourne for help.

The on-set death of the leading man jeopardizes the future of The Bride of Babylon, an Australian silent movie trying to fend off competition from Hollywood. As an investor in the film, Phryne is called in to investigate. When the director is also killed, Phryne decides to direct the proceedings herself.

The captain of a local football team is found hanged before a game against the crosstown rivals, who appear to be the likely suspects. However, Phryne and Jack find evidence that the man may have killed himself and have to figure out why someone might want to make a suicide look like a murder.