“Sometimes we don’t see everything that’s going on”
A tale of how the supernatural can linger in the same house, Marchlands was an
ITV drama originally broadcast in early 2011. Written by Stephen Greenhorn and
set in Yorkshire, it follows the fortunes of three families who all live in the
same house. In 1968, Ruth and Paul are mourning the death of their 8 year old
daughter Alice but suffering from a serious lack of communication and stifled
by living with his parents. In 1987, the Maynard family struggle to deal with young
Amy’s invisible best friend whose arrival coincides with all sorts of strange
happenings. And in 2010, Mark and Nisha return to the village of his childhood,
but secrets from the past threaten their future and that of their unborn child.
Greenhorn’s writing cleverly sets up and slowly unravels a different set of
mysteries in each of the strands, whilst also introducing overlapping elements
which intertwine across the years. Jodie Whittaker’s Ruth, dismissed as a
hysterical grieving mother, brings a tortured
distress to her determination to find out the truth behind her daughter’s
drowning; Dean Andrews and Alex Kingston pair up brilliantly as the 80s couple
whose children are inexplicably caught up in Alice’s web; and Shelley Conn is
convincing as the modern-day new mother, stressed from the demands of
parenthood, the loneliness of her new home, the mysteries that her husband, the
ever delectable Elliot Cowan, won’t reveal. And then there is Anne Reid, in
scintillating form as a woman vital to all of the stories.
Director James Kent differentiates the different time periods neatly without too
much heavyhandedness, instead subtly using different lighting schemes of
increasing brightness as the years progress. Connecting images join up scene transitions successfully,
recurring motifs echo back and forth and the strong water imagery that underpins
so much is powerfully used to portentous effect. As ever with me, when the
scariness becomes too literal (the end of episode 2), it loses some of its
genuinely chilling nature. But this is restrained to just a couple of usages
and elsewhere it really does send shivers down the spine, with tinkling music boxes
and possessed little girls both ticking the boxes of what would keep me awake
at night.
And importantly, there’s an incredibly strong sense of story-telling that
underpins the whole production. Shocks and thrills are used aplenty but only to
augment the story, and as it turns out, what is scarier is the way in which
humans behave in order to protect what they have and the decisions they consequently
make. Marchlands emerges as a distressing story of ghosts and regrets and pain
and loss, but always utterly gripping and powerfully played.
Labels: Alex Kingston, Anne Reid, Denis Lawson, Elliot Cowan, Jamie Thomas King, Jodie Whittaker, Nick Sidi, Ryan Prescott, Shelley Conn, Sophie Stone, Tessa Peake-Jones