If you happened to switch on ITV this weekend, chances are you discovered a murder thriller that has absolutely no business being this brutal on a Sunday evening.
Not that we weren’t warned. The six-part crime show is, after all, called The Dark. Opening with a shot of an as-yet unidentified murderer hauling the body of a dead teenage boy into the Scottish Highlands, episode one ends with another teenage boy drugged, paralysed and waiting for the killer to come and do his worst. The Dark lives up to its name.
The show is adapted from GR Halliday’s From the Shadows, the first in a series centred on Scottish DI Monica Kennedy. Laura Donnelly is brilliant as the deadpan, no-nonsense Kennedy, who has her own edge of menace, telling a mystery woman who has been loitering around her and her young daughter: “I’ll take you and I’ll bury you somewhere you’ll never be found.” Safe to say Kennedy is not from the Jessica Fletcher school of murder detectives.
This threat of grim terror runs through every scene, as Kennedy and her work partner, DCI Connor Crawford (Mark Rowley), make the grotesque discovery that there is a serial killer on the loose in their small Scottish town. Potential suspects are presented early: a scary-looking dad whose son went missing, never to return, a few years back; a secretive social worker whose case involved the same teenager; a local game hunter who has an air of the psychopath about him. Throw in a few mentions of a pagan cult, a killer in an incredibly ghoulish mask and a lead character with dark secrets of her own, and we have a crime series that looks set to grip the nation in a way not seen on ITV since 2013’s Broadchurch.
What’s interesting is that the showrunner deliberately chose to make the victims teenage boys. Perhaps that is what makes it so shockingly upsetting when their bodies are shown on screen. We have become so conditioned — and arguably desensitised — to seeing female victims in TV crime stories (some streamers even have whole “women in peril” categories) that the switch to young men makes it even more horrifying. Executive producer Ben Stephenson said in the show’s press notes: “It was really important to me that the murder victims were young men, not women… There are certain dramatic scenarios that I would have felt comfortable with 10 years ago, that I wouldn’t feel comfortable with doing now.”
It’s a similar story with the trope-ish way detective dramas always end up in the morgue, with the cadaver traditionally exposed and prodded during the autopsy, purely for exposition and shock value. The Dark flips the script and does away with morgue scenes, instead having the pathologist leave Kennedy voice notes, detailing her gruesome findings via audio files, a device that somehow makes proceedings even creepier. An Eastern European disembodied voice reading out the ways in which the serial killer has exacted death on his victim’s body makes it feel uncomfortably dystopian for WhatsApp to be used in such a way, especially when juxtaposed with the murderer striking again in real time, using exactly the methods being described. It’s meant to put the viewer further on edge. It works.
This Scots-noir story is also told through the grey, dark tinge of the film, with a gloomy atmosphere that stretches from the moss-covered hills of the Highlands, where the bodies are found, to the rural farms and cottages of the local people, each suspecting the other of being the killer. How can there be light here, the series asks, when it exists at the heart of darkness?