Allan Cubitt’s Belfast thriller gives detective and killer equal time, and Gillian Anderson and Jamie Dornan make the split work. It is cold and often frightening; it also lingers on dead women too long, and runs two series past its best.
Allan Cubitt’s idea is to split the hour down the middle. Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) flies into Belfast from the Metropolitan Police to review a murder inquiry that has gone nowhere. Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) has a wife, Sally Ann (Bronagh Waugh), children and a notebook of women he has chosen. We know who the killer is before the police know there is one. Each episode is 57 minutes, and roughly half of every one belongs to him.
Anderson is the reason to watch. She plays Gibson slowly: she rarely raises her voice, sits still in meetings full of men who do not, and says what she means in complete sentences. Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh and Maggie Donnelly put her in pale silk blouses that look wrong in a Belfast incident room and are meant to. The scene in the first series in which she picks up a detective for the night, is later asked to account for it, and declines, told us more about the character than any speech about profiling could.
Dornan is more limited and used well. Spector is handsome, quiet and dull, and the programme understands that the dullness is the point: he reads bedtime stories, argues about the washing-up, goes to work, and none of it is a mask. Ruairí O’Brien and David Grennan shoot both leads in the same cool blue-grey light, hotel room and family kitchen alike, and Steve Singleton cuts between them so often that after a while we stopped noticing whose evening we were in. That is what Cubitt wants, and it is the best thing here.
It is also where our trouble started. In the first episode Spector lets himself into a woman’s house while she is out, goes through her drawers and lays her underwear out on the bed. We were horrified, and the horror was earned: the sound is his breathing and the small noises of a house that is not his. Then the programme kept doing it. Bodies are washed, posed and photographed slowly from above; the camera goes back to them, and we began to feel we were being asked to admire the arrangement rather than fear the man who made it. Most critics have forgiven this on the grounds that the series is about how men look at women. Showing something at length is not the same as criticising it.
The supporting cast is strong and under-used. John Lynch’s Jim Burns, the senior officer with a history with Gibson, gets the programme’s one honest conversation about what the case is costing. Niamh McGrady’s Dani Ferrington, whom Gibson pulls onto her team, is the person we would have followed into a programme of her own. Archie Panjabi’s Tanya Reed Smith is given a handful of scenes and little else. Gillian Devenney and Tom McCullagh make the Spector house ordinary, cluttered and laminate-floored, and the police station a grey box, which is right.
Then there are the second and third series. The first, five episodes from 12 May 2013, ends on a real question. The second, from November 2014, answers it with six episodes that are slower and more interested in Spector’s psychology than in whether anyone will stop him; Colin Morgan arrives as Tom Anderson, a detective who seems to have been hired chiefly to give Gibson someone to look at. The third, from September 2016, we will not describe except to say it tests the patience of anyone who came for a police procedural. Cubitt, who shares the directing with Jakob Verbruggen, plainly could not let Spector go. We could, some time before he did.
Watch the first series in the dark, on consecutive nights. It is an 18 certificate and means it. If Anderson has you by the end of the fifth episode, carry on with your eyes open; if the camera’s interest in the bodies has already made you uneasy, that unease does not go away.
