Pete Jackson’s eight-part drama about a boy raised in isolation and told monsters wait outside is quiet, odd and tender, and Lewis Gribben’s Danny is a performance we have gone on thinking about. The cousin’s subplot and a thriller-shaped finale cost it a little.
Danny (Lewis Gribben) is eighteen and has never been outside. His father Steve (Rory Keenan) has told him since he was small that monsters killed his mother and that they are still out there, past the trees. Inside there are old records, old films on the television, a locked door and the two of them. Pete Jackson’s eight-part series, directed throughout by Alexandra Brodski, starts in that house and asks what happens to a boy raised like this when the door is finally opened. Steve is gone within the first episode, and Danny is sent to live with an aunt he has never met.
Gribben is the reason to watch, and we would say that even if the rest were ordinary. He plays Danny tall and folded in on himself, head down, hands at his sides, speaking the careful, old-fashioned English of someone who learned it from films made before his father was born. He flinches at cars. He answers questions nobody meant to be answered. When he is frightened he goes quiet rather than loud, and Brodski keeps the camera on him and waits. We were surprised how much of the first two episodes we spent with a hand near our mouth. The scene that did it is small: Danny on a doorstep with nothing between him and the sky, deciding whether to step out. Gribben plays it as if the sky were a ceiling that has not yet fallen.
Keenan’s Steve is seen mostly in flashback, with Samuel McKenna as Danny at seven, and his is the harder part. A kidnapper who loves his child is a stock figure. A grieving man who has built a prison out of bedtime stories because he cannot face the world without his wife is not, and Keenan plays him warm: he dances the boy round the house to the records, reads to him, feeds him, and makes sure he is never allowed out. We did not like him. We could not quite hate him either, and that is Jackson’s writing as much as Keenan’s face.
Brodski shoots the two worlds differently without making a fuss about it. The house is lamplight, brown wood and record sleeves. The outside, the aunt’s street, the shops, the back seat of a car, is flat, overcast and a little too wide, so Danny always looks as if he has been set down in the wrong frame. The music is Steve’s music, the old songs he raised the boy on, and it follows Danny into the present, where it sounds like something left on in an empty house.
Lisa McGrillis’s Sue, the aunt, wants to do right by this boy and also wants her kitchen back, and McGrillis holds both at once without letting either tip into caricature. Johann Myers’s Paul, her partner, is the calm one, and the series lets him be simply decent. Samuel Bottomley’s Aaron, Sue’s son, is Danny’s age and wants nothing to do with him; Bottomley is good at the particular meanness of a teenager who has been told to be kind.
Aaron is also where the series wobbles. The trouble he is in on his own account belongs to a more ordinary drama, and each time Jackson cuts to it the series goes slack. And in the last two episodes the story starts to behave like a thriller, with questions about the past and people who might answer them, and the plot is pushed harder than the first six needed. We will not say where it goes. We will say the quieter programme, the one about a boy learning what a bus is for, was the better one, and that Jackson knows it, because he keeps coming back to it.
Watch it over a few nights rather than one. The episodes are short and end on edges, and the edges land better with sleep between them. Go into the first one knowing no more than we have told you. The best thing the series does is make us see a kettle, a road and a stranger’s face the way Danny does, and that only works once.
