Where does A Remarkable Place to Die take place? The real New Zealand town it's both set and filmed in
Some shows invent a town, some shows borrow one, and some shows just point a camera at a real place so photogenic it feels like set dressing. A Remarkable Place to Die is firmly in category three.
The Acorn TV murder mystery is set in Queenstown, New Zealand — and unlike roughly 90% of television, it was actually filmed there too, no stand-ins, no "Vancouver with a filter." Even the title is a geography joke hiding in plain sight.
The Remarkables are real (and remarkably on the nose)
Queenstown sits on Lake Wakatipu at the foot of a jagged mountain range literally named The Remarkables. So the title works triple duty: gorgeous place, dead bodies, actual cartography. The show's grimmest landmark is real, too — Skippers Canyon Road, the vertigo-inducing cliff road where cars keep going over the edge, ranks among the world's more dangerous drives even without a homicide plot attached. Detective Anais Mallory's beat also swings through recognizable spots like the Amisfield winery, where cast and crew were spotted shooting during season one.
A production that moved in and never left
This isn't a fly-in-fly-out shoot. About 150 cast and crew set up camp in Queenstown for over 70 shooting days across every season of the year, and creator Philly de Lacey — who told the Otago Daily Times mid-shoot,
"We have loved Queenstown"
— then went and built Remarkable Studios, a permanent production facility in the region, so the show could keep filming there through at least 2027. Germany fell for the scenery so hard that ZDF airs the series under the title Queenstown Murders: Zum Sterben schön — roughly "drop-dead gorgeous," which, given the premise, is a spectacular piece of dark comedy from a public broadcaster.
Your Queenstown-of-the-show checklist
- Lake Wakatipu & The Remarkables — the backdrop of basically every establishing shot
- Skippers Canyon — the cliff road central to the Mallory family tragedy; drive it only if your rental insurance says you can (many say you can't)
- Amisfield — the winery that doubles as scenic filming territory
- Queenstown itself / Tāhuna — the town's Māori name, which the production has increasingly foregrounded
And it's happening right now
Season two premiered September 13, 2026 — six feature-length episodes, filmed entirely in the region at the new studio, with a cast that now includes Luke Arnold and JJ Fong. De Lacey has framed the whole enterprise as
"showcasing our culture to the world,"
which is a lovely way of saying: the body count is fictional, the town is not, and the tourism board has never been so conflicted.
Previously we wrote: What is a ghost in Ghost in the Shell? The meaning, and the 1967 philosophy book the term was lifted from
