Summerwater (Channel 4)
There has to be a special circle in hell reserved for people who ruin your summer holiday. May it rain there endlessly, and be filled with sadistic passport officials and drunken stag parties.
Steve and Justine, in Summerwater, have done their level best to get away from it all.
They’ve taken their two adolescent children to a scatter of rental cabins beside a Scottish loch in the Highlands.
There’s no internet, and barely a phone signal. The only danger of rowdy neighbours, you’d think, might be the clash of antlers among the red deer, and possibly the morning skirl of bagpipes drifting on the wind from the Balmoral estate.
But one of the cabins has been taken by a crowd of media types who are so determined to party, they’ve brought their own sound system and enough coloured lights to decorate Blackpool tower.
Why Steve and Justine put up with it, night after night, I don’t know. They keep stomping outside and glowering, but they’re scared to say anything.
Who these ravers are, and why they’ve come to the remotest part of Britain to raise a racket, we won’t find out till Tuesday, in episode three.
Each instalment of Summerwater centres on a different family in the cabins, and the opener was all about Justine (Valene Kane) and her mental breakdown.
Set beside a Scottish loch in the Highlands, Summerwater will appeal to fans of small town cult classic Twin Peaks, writes Christopher Stevens
This six-part series is based on a disturbing psychological novel by Sarah Moss, one that uses artful literary techniques to create a sense of otherworldliness
This six-part series is based on a disturbing psychological novel by Sarah Moss, one that uses artful literary techniques to create a sense of otherworldliness.
The chapter headings are fragments of poetry, spelled without capital letters — ‘the audacity of small craft’, ‘other silent swimmers’, and so on.
In this TV adaptation, director Robert McKillop strives to convey this effect in scenes that roll in and out of focus, blurring at the edges. Justine has heart disease and is prone to blackouts, but despite this, she insists on going for long runs of almost suicidal intensity.
During one dawn exercise session, she passes out and awakes in a sort of fairytale vision, at a tumbledown shack in the woods, furnished with lace curtains and tarnished mirrors.
Inside, she discovers a man and a woman, apparently ghosts, and the fantasy takes an erotic turn.
Meanwhile, the police are trying to contact her to discuss a complaint by a colleague that Justine has keyed her car and threatened her with a kitchen knife. We catch glimpses of this in flashback, to a soundtrack of music like the echoes of a nightmare.
Fans of Twin Peaks, the murder-mystery set in the American backwoods, will enjoy spotting the parallels. When Justine stands over her husband (Daniel Rigby) clutching a hammer, is she possessed by evil spirits from the haunted shack? Or is she merely a deeply troubled woman, searching for an escape from the stresses of her life?
In which case, couldn’t those selfish swine in the party cabin just turn the noise down?