Hugo Blick’s eight-part thriller about an Anglo-Israeli businesswoman, a West Bank contract and a death in a hotel room is slow, handsome and full of people speaking in riddles. Maggie Gyllenhaal and Stephen Rea make the patience worth it, mostly.
Each episode opens the same way: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s voice, before anything else, asking who we trust and how we know. It is the question the whole series rests on, and Hugo Blick, who created, wrote and directed all eight episodes, wants it to carry a great deal: a family arms business, a peerage, a murder thirty years old, a kidnapping in Gaza and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself. It is a spy story that also wants to be about the Middle East, and it does not always manage both at once. It is good, and it makes you wait.
The waiting is the style. Zac Nicholson and George Steel shoot long, level frames with people placed dead centre in doorways and at the far ends of corridors, and Blick holds them well past the point most television would cut. Jason Krasucki’s editing lets a scene finish before the next one starts. Chris Roope’s design gives Nessa a house of pale wood and glass and, in the middle of it, a windowless room with a steel door in which she sleeps every night. Edward K. Gibbon dresses her almost entirely in cream and white, so that in any room she is the brightest thing on screen. Martin Phipps and Natalie Holt supply sombre strings, and they are used more often than they need to be.
We were horrified by the first five minutes, and we had known for years roughly what was in them. A man is murdered at a restaurant table in front of his two small children, and Blick does not cut away from the children. It is the one truly violent scene in the opening episode and it pays for everything after it, because from then on we understand why a woman who has done nothing wrong goes to bed in a vault.
Gyllenhaal is the reason to watch. Her Nessa is poised, quick, dry at a lectern, and underneath it frightened all the time. She does the English accent well and, more important, she does the class: the way a woman raised rich in London holds a glass and takes an insult. In the flashbacks to Gaza, eight years earlier, she is someone else entirely, and the gap between the two women is where the series keeps its secrets. Opposite her, Stephen Rea plays Hugh Hayden-Hoyle, head of MI6’s Middle East desk, as a man who has been tired for so long he has made a craft of it: cardigan, slow walk, every question asked as if he already regrets the answer. His scenes with Janet McTeer’s Julia Walsh, his superior, have the rhythm of a long marriage, and Lindsay Duncan as his estranged wife Anjelica gets a scene or so an episode and wins every one of them.
Lubna Azabal, as Atika, the Palestinian woman who runs Ephra Stein’s household, has the hardest job, because for most of the run we are meant not to be sure what she is, and she plays that with a stillness that never turns into a mask. Andrew Buchan’s Ephra is a weaker man than his sister and knows it. Katherine Parkinson, as his pregnant wife Rachel, is a comic actor asked to be miserable and is good at it. Eve Best’s Monica Chatwin, the MI6 officer in Washington, has the best posture in the series and smiles a great deal.
Then there is the talking. Blick’s people do not converse so much as issue statements, and a good deal of the dialogue sounds as if it was written to be quoted afterwards. Some of it is good. Some of it made us wish somebody would simply say what they knew. As the plot widens to take in Israeli intelligence, in the shape of Yigal Naor’s Shlomo Zahary, the Americans and a conspiracy around the cabling contract, it becomes harder to hold in the head, and the later episodes ask us to accept that a great many powerful people have spent years arranging events around one woman’s private life. We accepted it, mostly. There is a turn in the middle we will not describe, and it is the moment the series stops being a puzzle and becomes about a person. It moved us more than the puzzle ever did.
Set against the British spy serials it descends from, it is more patient than most and more solemn than any. Watch two episodes at a sitting and no more; the style needs air. And sit through the opening monologue every time. By the sixth or seventh, the question means something different.
