Sometimes no amount of wanting to like something will reprieve a damning verdict. This was quite simply as big a waste of time as 'Dancing on the Edge'.
You may not have a very high opinion of your local cops, but d'you think they believe in witchcraft? No, neither do we. That's not to say there's no such thing as witches (nor to say that there is), but this would have us buy Peter McDonald's Alan blaming local blonde teenager Hattie for his impotence with his wife. Seth, the nominal village idiot (we would say "person with learning difficulties" but there's no attempt to avoid cliches here, so we won't) tells Alan that Hattie is a witch, and how to counteract her spells, so he kidnaps her and strangles her when she tries to escape. When his wife realises what he's done, she proves herself even more barking than her husband by framing her ex-boyfriend to "keep the family together". Because, obviously, you would want a man who no longer fancied you and killed the childlike object of his lust. What a guy! Not that the other male suspects came out of it any better. Everett (Aidan Gillen) was a self-confessed "shit" and Malcolm (Peter Firth, more lugubrious by the hour) watched the murder without doing anything to help. Malcolm's wife fares little better, mashing up her husband's ashes and feeding him to the dog. Almost anyone other than Lesley Manville would have lost our sympathy altogether. Plus, what happened to Hattie's dad, last seen beating the innards out of Seth in the woods?
If it was trying to emulate 'The Killing' and other Danish dramas, it failed. The offbeat supernatural theme was handled less convincingly than in 'Midsomer Murders', which this resembled more than anything else. It was slow, and the characters behaved like the puppets of writers wanting a tense plot at the expense of real people with real emotions. We can't help but feel that it may have been submitted as a 'Midsomer...' script but turned down as being too unbelievable. This idea may have worked set in 17th Century Pendle, or even 19th Century rural Ireland (viz. the Cleary case) but we can only think that those who commissioned this were... under some kind of a spell?
Thank you for this! I happen to love spoilers and usually look up who the person looked for in thrillers is from the beginning (to see how the cinematography is developed in that film) and this helped a lot. Also I agree that it had some big weak points such as how inconsistent characters behaved and how slow motion shots mixed with loud horror music seemed to be used instead of much else and it is so true that the entire story could be summed up in about an hour and a half. The ending also wasn't really satisfying at all with more uncalled for reactions from different characters in the story. Some logical faults also were present such as how the town seemed to be completely cut off from the rest of the world and how despite the town being really small it was implied more than once that the people of the town didn't even know each other's names and histories and many subplots were left in the dark.
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