Review: "River"

 

Abi Morgan (Creator), “River”, Kudos/Shine International/BBC One/Netflix, 2015.

Convincing an audience that something fantastic is going on in your fictive work is a bit of a high-wire act. If your target demographic isn’t convinced of what you’re trying to sell, then the whole enterprise quickly falls apart. The easy solution would seem of course - in the case of a visual medium effort – to obtain the best actors, directors, cinematographers – what have you - that money can buy; in this instance, I think the creators have knocked it out of the park.

There is a spooky premise to this show – a supernatural rationale – but I don’t want to let any cats out of their bags. Going in on these six episodes, I had no idea what to expect: I was looking for a gritty British police procedural to while away an evening’s ennui and I suddenly had just that, along with something completely unexpected and – dare I say? – delightful. Of course, the presence of Stellan Skarsgård and Nicola Walker meant that – had this been simply a stultifying home renovation program – I would still have watched the hell out of it; the supernatural aspects of this show were merely the excellent icing atop this wonderful cake.

The BBC is the spiritual home of the police drama. No-one else takes the sordid realities of the Street and boils them down to soul-crushing narratives in quite the same way. Take for example, the new show “The Responder” which is doing the rounds at the moment. I started watching this and had to stop. The grubby particulars of this show were almost too much to bear. I mean, there’s dark, and then there’s this: it’s like an exercise in pushing the envelope; there’s a gleefully iconoclastic edge to everything going on that actually starts to break the audience’s engagement due to its intensity. All that aside however, my main issue with it is that Martin Freeman – who I normally find eminently watchable - is completely miscast. There’s something about his performance and physical presence that is at odds with the material – maybe he was trying to prove that he too, could swan about like “Cracker” in a downbeat thug-fest, but I’m here to tell you that he can’t. No amount of withholding the razor and a good night’s sleep can knock the optimistic shine off Bilbo Baggins. There’s something quintessentially Home Counties about him that a bad haircut can’t disguise.

Now, if you had put Stellan Skarsgård in his shoes, then, you’d have something…

In “River”, my one issue is that the world – despite everything that comes out in the conclusion of this show – is a little too vanilla for the actors at hand. This is a plus and a minus: most of the drama here is internal with John River balancing his workload with his mental trauma, psychological scars which absolutely could not have been portrayed this well by any other thespian. Having witnessed his partner, and the person whom he had just begun to realise was the love of his life, gunned down brutally before him in the street, River starts tiptoeing around both his work colleagues and the enforced psychological review that he’s made to engage with, while simultaneously trying to solve the mystery of who his partner’s assailant was. That he hears – and responds to – voices unheard by those around him makes the knife-edge levels of his sanity more than apparent to everyone, including himself.

It's a testament to the writing that we don’t spot these voices until at least two-thirds of the way through the first episode. The writing allows the spookiness to slide right under the radar until the story deems it necessary to reveal the supernatural goings-on to the audience and it hits like a chill bucket of water to the face. I had been riding along with this show, enjoying the banter and the easy relationship of the two leads when suddenly I knew that I had something a bit extra to be getting on with. Right, I thought, this has taken a turn: I’d better strap in. Seriously though, with these two actors – plus the addition of a 70s disco soundtrack – if nothing at all had changed, I would have kept watching.

These supernatural elements are exquisitely handled. Everything occurs against the backdrop of John River’s mental disintegration and the plot becomes highly equivocal depending upon where you stand. The information that River receives from his spiritual sources is slippery and, at every stage, John, his co-workers, the suspects of his investigation, never know whether the information he’s working with is real or not, or whether it can be used in the chain of evidence. It’s a bravura performance from the writers and the actors and, because it’s all based upon a solid set of rules governing the spectral that the creators have set out clearly from the start, it works a treat. The scenes wherein John and his work-appointed psychologist play cat-and-mouse around the possibility of supernatural forces at play, are crafted to perfection and wonderful to observe.

The only real grizzle I have with the show is everything is a little too neat. The action takes place in a very enclosed world – every character leads to the next significant character and the narrative has a consequent hermetic feel to it. Essentially, the world of “River” is a very small one into which nothing of a wider reality intrudes. A key element of the investigation involves a shonky car-hire accompany and chauffeuring service, the name of which becomes a common refrain as things progress, flagging to the viewer the final destination of the mystery. In essence, all roads lead to Rome, and everyone has connexions to everyone else. It’s a little incestuous but, given one of the big reveals at the end, maybe that’s deliberate.

My biggest delight with this show is that, while it has everything that you’d want in a gritty police procedural, it’s also very human and incredibly sad, while at the same time being quite uplifting and inspiring, in the best tradition of such fare. As I said in the beginning, lesser thespians would not have made this work, but they run with it and elevate everything around them to build a fantastic – in all senses – piece of television drama.

Four Tentacled Horrors.