You know you're watching something different when it opens in black and white on a night square in Lille (I think) and someone shouts 'Action!' and people are walking and a bus goes by and it changes to colour - so we're in a strange fantasy world, though it's populated by real people, mainly a couple - Olivia Colman and David Thewlis - and some investigating detectives - Kate O'Flynn (Happy-Go-Lucky, Bridget Jones' Baby, Doctor Thorne, Close to Me, No Offence, Kingdom) Samuel Anderson and Daniel Rigby. Decor and photography evoke an earlier period than it actually is, fantasy scenes involving Gary Cooper and High Noon (and Le Dernier Metro).
Striking moments in which the couple recount their stories whilst actually appearing in the flashback they're telling - not entirely a new idea - didn't Richard Fleischer have a way of doing something similar? Though nothing as creatively head-scrambling as Olivia being led out of the police interview room set and into the murder scene set, where all the participants calmly do as they're told until Thewlis murders them. Or the Wild West sequences that accompany the (monochrome) court scenes. Or Thewlis target practice in which you wonder who the (twelve) people observing him are, only for it to become clear later it's the jury.
The style strongly suits the treatment of the couple who are in a fantasy world, hers perhaps triggered by years of abuse from her father.
Written by Olivia's other half Ed Sinclair. She of course was in Sharpe's Flowers. Dipo Ola is the lawyer. Arthur Sharpe provides the strange music (also Flowers). Good acting. Bold, impressive.
Olivia revealed on Graham that her husband had at one point foolishly tried to give her an acting note, 'which went down like a cup of cold sick'.
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