True to its name, ITV’s new primetime detective drama is dark. Really dark. Pitch-black levels of grimness and intrigue enough to effectively entice the British viewer, who by now is desensitised to seeing just any old dead body on screen. No, the corpses we want to pore over with our nighttime cuppa and chocolate digestive have to be unusually grisly to get our attention, and the ones in The Dark fit the bill – killed with meticulous, psychopathic care by a meticulous, psychopathic killer. Did I mention he wears a creepy mask too?
An adaptation – is anything not, these days? – of GR Halliday’s crime novel From the Shadows, the six-part show taps into that familiar human impulse: to edge closer to what disturbs us and linger on it in HD for 45 minutes, not including ad breaks. In the Scottish countryside, tough-as-nails DI Monica Kennedy (Laura Donnelly) and her new partner, the town’s Casanova, DC Connor Crawford (Mark Rowley), are on the hunt after the body of a teenage boy is found naked and staged in the wilderness. Another follows; it seems a serial killer is on the loose.
One thing is for certain, The Dark does not start slow – any scene-setting is done on the move. (As a result, there is some clunky expositional dialogue to assist: “So what are you telling me? That someone is murdering the children of my staff?” says one character in a nifty summary of everything so far.) The bodies pile up fast and revelations come to light even faster: red herrings do not stay red for long. The momentum is propulsive and unrelenting – certainly it’s gripping, though a cynic might say the pace is designed for TikTok-addled brains.
Either way, it’s not long before the killer’s MO comes into focus. He preys on teenage boys, infiltrating their lives briefly via a burner phone, and then drugging them before sneaking into their homes and taking them from their own beds – all the while his victims are paralysed, unable to do anything but watch. What follows is ritualistic: the bodies are arranged and left on grisly display, waiting to be discovered.
It’s far-fetched obviously, but terrifying all the same – and calls to mind the outlandish cases once faced by another tortured detective of the screen, DCI John Luther. The Dark doesn’t exactly break the mould, then – but Donnelly does well with her “brilliant detective with a dark past who does things her way” cookie-cutter character, bringing just the right amount of snark and haunted glare to the role. Helen Baxendale too, best known for her role in Friends as Ross’s British wife, makes a suitably harrowing appearance as the mum of one of the victims.
And so while The Dark does traffic in tropes, it does so with integrity – which is why it jars when the dialogue slips occasionally into unforgivable cliché. Examining the identical black pebbles found lodged inside the bodies of the killer’s victims, the forensic pathologist on the case observes: “The rock is dark… dark as the darkest soul.”
What The Dark does have on its side is timing. With terrestrial TV dominated by tennis and football, there has been a serious lack of addictive, grisly drama so far this summer – even a fairly average cop show scratches the itch.
