Duncan Greive: The Keepers is 'harrowing but impossibly compelling'

True crime is everywhere at the moment. In New Zealand its peak is outstanding feature writing, like The Wireless' sad, savage report into the kidnappings at Dome Valley last week. In Australia it's podcasts like Phoebe's Fall and Bowraville. The US, with more crime and more money, is turning episodic documentary investigations into the amongst the best strand of contemporary TV.

Netflix has followed its 2016 smash Making a Murderer with The Keepers, a reinvestigation of a 1969 cold case which might be the darkest yet. If nothing else it makes the case (again) that the Catholic Church was a giant global criminal organisation, operating in plain sight and according to its own appalling rules.

The story it tells is largely that of Sister Cathy Cesnik, a young nun teaching at Keough High School in Baltimore (the same city and investigating police department which would later give us The Wire. For a city about the size of Wellington, it really overdelivers on murder). One day she goes out shopping and never returns, her body eventually found with its skull caved in some months and miles distant.

Nearly 50 years after her death, Sister Cathy Cesnik's former students are still investigating her murder.

The narrative cleaves into two, setting the scene and following the initial police investigation, such as it was, while also introducing a trio of amateur sleuths still chasing the story today. The former is necessarily light on footage and information, to an extent, with repeated pans across the same black and white images as we recount bare facts of life and death.

It's the contemporary investigative thread which is the more initially compelling. A pair of women retirees, both former Keough students, never did forget the case and commence a dogged reinvestigation. They're joined by a similarly aged journalist - a trio in their 60s, obsessing over a crime five decades past which has never sat right.

All investigative roads lead to the Church, then the most significant organisation in these predominantly working class Irish Catholic suburbs. It codified their social lives, ran its schools and its priests were the most powerful figures within it. It manifestly played a bigger and more meaningful role in this community's lives than government - yet also stretched into institutions like law enforcement through the bonds of family and friendship.

The Keepers reveals all kinds of indecent behaviour took place at Archbishop Keough High School.

This meant that when Sesnik disappeared, her colleagues were both crucial suspects and somehow beyond reproach. It also explains why generations of young women felt paralysed by the church's vast reach and completely unable to discuss what was happening to them with authorities or even family.

The Keepers has an appealingly sprawling structure, each episode an hour or more long and confidently moving through different decades to establish critical facts or narrative moments. Its largest component part is interviews with women, then teenagers, now much older, going back into their school days. Into what happened to them, what Sister Cathy knew, and how those two things intersected.

It's harrowing but impossibly compelling, a portrait of an era which is often held up as better than the present in so many ways, yet which hid a myriad appalling abuses behind superficial order.

The Keepers is the equal of anything in the true crime revival in scope and execution, swelling in detail until it drags the viewer down into a distant yet viscerally conveyed past.