Zeit bites: Invite The Stranger into your home
Ihave a seemingly bottomless appetite for British crime drama. No matter how quaint, how convoluted, or how fantastical (Bodyguard, I’m looking at you), if bad stuff is being done in a jolly old British fashion, I am there for it.
I don’t mind admitting that goes double for anything starring honorary Kiwi, Richard Armitage. (What? He made three movies here once. The Aussies steal Kiwis for much less).
So it was that I found myself flinging open my streaming door and inviting The Stranger, Netflix’s new crime drama starring Armitage, right in.
I didn’t exactly give it a good spot on the sofa, right off. It had to sing for its supper.
Luckily, Armitage and his co-stars Dervla Kirwan (who plays his duplicitous – or is she? – wife), Stephen Rea (as a client with a dark past), Paul Kaye (who plays a bad cop, very well), and Siobhan Finneran (who plays a good cop, even better) are able to provide a right old knees-up.
I don’t know why I’ve gone all Cockney though, as the show is adapted from the novel of the same name by American author Harlan Coben, who usually sets his stories in and around New Jersey.
However, Coben wrote another Netflix series,
Safe, set in Britain, starring American Michael C Hall as a Brit.
Netflix has seen fit to set its version of The Stranger in some indeterminate northern-ish town in the United Kingdom, that’s part Liverpool or Leeds, and a bit London – by which I mean, it doesn’t really matter, it’s Westchestshireby, in the county of Englandville.
What does matter is that this is a clever mystery thriller that doesn’t reveal its secrets until it absolutely has to, without wasting any of the goodwill it earns with its gruesome opening.
When a stranger confronts upright dad-of-two Adam Price (Armitage) with a terrible secret about his wife, it sets off a series of events that will lead to murder.
Is the ‘‘secret’’ even true, how does the stranger know about it and what does any of it have to do with the decapitated llama that’s been dumped in the local shopping centre?
You’ll have to ask The Stranger.