House of Wackos

Lejink

This four part thriller shown on the BBC on consecutive Sundays turned out to be an excursion into modern-day Gothic melodrama mixed in with a good old-fashioned whodunit. Along the way it tries to make points about neighbourliness, loneliness and control as all of the inhabitants of a small block of flats conveniently seem to forget about the existence of the young, fat, solitary female who lived in the top-floor flat until two years after her disappearance, her bodily remains are discovered in the loft above her apartment, triggering the narrative.

Cue red-herrings galore and a backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards use of flashback to fill in the lead-up to the slain girl's demise. The viewer is kept guessing as to who the actual perpetrator is with a veritable procession of possible candidates paraded before us, including a seedy old teacher and the mysterious young woman he keeps in his flat, a pair of lesbians, one nasty and dominating, the other humane but servile, a careworn divorcée male newspaper editor, his reporter girlfriend and surly, hormonal teenage son, who are all joined by a young couple, him a feckless jack-the-lad, her a good-natured Indian girl, heavily pregnant, who move into the flat below the dead girl's and who actually make the grisly discovery.

Brought into investigate the death is crusty old soon-to-retire police detective David Threlfall, another Mr Lonely himself, who seems to relate to the dead girl so much that he pursues the case even after his last day on the job (and after his former colleagues have all moved on to their next cases) to the extent of staying overnight in her long abandoned flat, indeed for the epilogue we see him actually living there. He hits it off with the young mum-to-be and together they try to solve the mystery, indeed they are, along with the girl reporter, the only halfway decent people in the whole cast, the rest being an unappealing mixture of the venal, duplicitous, vindictive and just plain mean. For me this made it hard to relate to the bulk of the characters and stretched credibility to breaking point, I mean just how many horrible people can you fit into a block of flats at the same time?

Anyway, it winds it way to an over-the-the-top gory ending, with more than one dumb way to die along the way. Somewhere in it all is probably a moral about looking out for your neighbours, but along the road, the writer and director seemingly got consumed by some mystical Gothic bug and decided to try and whip up a kind of "I Know What You Did In the Loft" finale. It's reasonably well acted, although I'm tiring a little of Stephen MacKintosh's pained look in every character he portrays but on the whole this was an okay, if very incredible, whodunit, whydunit and howdunit which at least had me stumped up until the end.

score 5/10

Lejink 16 September 2013

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2870768/