Jesse Gohier-Fleet / HBO
If you were looking to move to the literal middle of nowhere, you might very well wind up in Larrimah, a tiny Australian outpost on Stewart Highway in the Northern Territory that, a few years back, boasted a population of 11.
Its ranks decreased by one on December 16, 2017, when long-time resident Paddy Moriarty vanished. It was a turn of events that stoked national curiosity, and it serves as fodder for a captivating whodunit and portrait of fringe life in Last Stop Larrimah, an HBO documentary (October 8)—produced by Jay and Mark Duplass who also produced Netflix’s Wild, Wild Country—about a small town, big feuds, and one extremely mysterious disappearance.
An Irishman who settled in Larrimah after pit stops in other Aussie locales (including one where he apparently had nine children with an Aboriginal woman), Paddy was apparently well-liked in Larrimah. And Thomas Tancred’s film conveys his gregarious straight-talking personality through old interviews with him and other locales that—in a stroke of storytelling luck—were produced years earlier by a TV news station.