The BBC has lately produced two excellent hyper-realistic crime dramas in "Line Of Duty" & "Inside Men" and is currently bigging up its crime drama season this winter but this interminable 5 hour long mess was a disaster from start to finish. The story of a missing May Queen teenager in a small English country village and the dirty secrets this brings up from the depths of its inhabitants suggests an unlikely combination of the spooky weirdness of "Twin Peaks" (ironically, or perhaps not, the young victim bears a striking resemblance to the US series' Laura Palmer), with its coterie of strange, damaged characters each with more baggage than a hotel bell-boy and clumsy attempts at constructing a scary atmosphere, with the labyrinthine plotting of say, "Inspector Morse" where almost every adult male character has the whiff of red herring about them. It just didn't work on any level for me and ended up more like a wildly out of control "Midsomer Murders" instead.
Myriad stories are mixed into the plot, focusing primarily on a young rebellious teenage schoolboy Linus and his seemingly unrequited love for the dead girl's twin sister, literally the girl next door, but who himself has an unsavoury relationship with the local peeping Tom, a building manager, who himself comes to a sticky end, indirectly as a result of his run-in with the dead girl, who we are led to believe, at the age of 16, is the community eco-warrior thorn in his side, upsetting his construction plans. Takes breath...throw in the boy's own fractious relationship with his devil-may-care father, stemming from the mysterious death of his mother and that's just the CV for one of the characters, there are similar ramifications and reverberations amongst the other main characters too.
At no time did the action seem natural or real, the plot had more holes than Rab C Nesbitt's string vest (just what was the murderer's motive, why and how did he drag the body up a tree in the oh-so-mysterious forest and what were the stones that kept falling on the twin sister meant to signify? If I thought hard enough, I could probably come up with answers, but I honestly can't be bothered.
The acting was poor right across the board, not one relationship between any of the parties seeming real, with equally poor dialogue and narrative construction too not forgetting a feeble "supernatural" ending tagged on for good measure. Were the writers trying to ironically send up the "village murder" template in a post-modern "League Of Gentleman" way, I don't know, but I do know that this was really poor fare and the proverbial five hours of my life I'm never going to get back.
Myriad stories are mixed into the plot, focusing primarily on a young rebellious teenage schoolboy Linus and his seemingly unrequited love for the dead girl's twin sister, literally the girl next door, but who himself has an unsavoury relationship with the local peeping Tom, a building manager, who himself comes to a sticky end, indirectly as a result of his run-in with the dead girl, who we are led to believe, at the age of 16, is the community eco-warrior thorn in his side, upsetting his construction plans. Takes breath...throw in the boy's own fractious relationship with his devil-may-care father, stemming from the mysterious death of his mother and that's just the CV for one of the characters, there are similar ramifications and reverberations amongst the other main characters too.
At no time did the action seem natural or real, the plot had more holes than Rab C Nesbitt's string vest (just what was the murderer's motive, why and how did he drag the body up a tree in the oh-so-mysterious forest and what were the stones that kept falling on the twin sister meant to signify? If I thought hard enough, I could probably come up with answers, but I honestly can't be bothered.
The acting was poor right across the board, not one relationship between any of the parties seeming real, with equally poor dialogue and narrative construction too not forgetting a feeble "supernatural" ending tagged on for good measure. Were the writers trying to ironically send up the "village murder" template in a post-modern "League Of Gentleman" way, I don't know, but I do know that this was really poor fare and the proverbial five hours of my life I'm never going to get back.