Deborah Ross’s verdict:
And so on to what feels like the 768th missing-child thriller of recent years, and this time it’s The Drowning. It starred Jill Halfpenny as Jodie, whose fouryear-old son, Tom, drowned a decade ago during a family picnic at a park lake but no body has ever been recovered, and already my hackles were raised. What? Not from a man- made park lake? It’s hardly Lake Superior, is it? The body is there or it isn’t. How well did they dredge it? I know, you can’t afford to think like this with these four-nights-in-a-row thrillers. You just have to accept you’re in for a schlocky and preposterous ride but, my goodness, it’s tough.
Back to it. Jodie has always been convinced that Tom was abducted and one day, as she’s driving along, she spots a boy on the street. He looks just like Tom, right down to the crescent-shaped scar beneath one eye. Is it him? Or, still deranged by grief, is she seeing what she wants to see?
This was written by Tim Dynevor, who has written many episodes of Emmerdale and is the father of Phoebe Dynevor, otherwise known as Daphne from Bridgerton. (Not relevant; just some trivia thrown in for free.) As Jodie negotiates her (strangely unfeeling) family as well as Tom’s father, now her ex, she does what any normal person would do, and steals herself into the boy’s life – now called Daniel (Cody Molko). She creeps and snoops and follows him on the bus to school and even insinuates herself as a music teacher there, faking and presenting a DBS certificate even though one would go straight from the authorities to the school, wouldn’t it? (Sorry. Can’t help it.) And she insinuates herself into his family life. The Daniel that may be Tom has a mother who is deceased but there’s his strict father, who seems to have plenty of secrets, played by Rupert Penry-Jones because if it’s not that Rupert it’s the other one. Rupert Graves?
With a budget coming in at the opposite end to The Undoing – poor Jodie doesn’t even get to be unhinged in a nice coat; it’s a terrible old tartan thing – this had many twists and turns as the tension was ratcheted up and up and up. It involved DNA, being held hostage in a show home, whacking people over the head, and woods, because there’s always woods, and a group of baddies sitting around an oil drum brazier, as they do, as headed by a nasty Russian, also in an awful coat. (Imitation leather.) This is three stars because Halfpenny is always extremely watchable, so that’s a star, and the coats were so sad, it’s another star, to compensate the cast who had to wear them, and the third is because you were propelled forward not so much to find out what did happen to Tom/Daniel but to discover how this would get out of the many corners it had painted itself into.
The ending was predictably schlocky and preposterous but I can’t say much more. Perhaps, at a later date, we could get together to discuss the plot holes? Bring snacks, as there are many, so we may be a while.
What The Drowning needed was to borrow those ‘cadaver dogs’ from Sweden that can smell human remains even when they are lying on the seabed. (And some people prefer cats?) These dogs featured in The Investigation, the six- part Danish true crime drama that concluded this week, but is available in full on iPlayer.
It’s about the Swedish journalist Kim Wall, who was murdered and dismembered in 2017, and a number of people had said I should watch it but I was, Nah – I can’t see how that would work. I’m fed up with crimes, particularly against women, being exploited for entertainment anyway. But I thought I’d do one episode, and then it was midnight and I’d done all six with scarcely a toilet break.
Wall went missing after interviewing an inventor on board his home-made submarine, which sank in the bay between Denmark and Sweden, but while he was rescued she was nowhere to be found. As he kept changing his story, the police knew he had killed her, but they needed evidence.
There are no gratuitous flashbacks and you never even see the killer, who is kept offscreen. This is about her, not him, and her devastated parents and, yes, the investigation. This is a police procedural in the purest sense as slowly, slowly, slowly, Copenhagen’s homicide chief, Jens Moller (a terrifically still performance from Soren Malling), and his team build their case.
Moller is compassionate and cares deeply and is the central figure and you could ask, I suppose, why Wall’s story is being told through the eyes of a man, albeit an admirable one, but then you could argue this is what happened?
Either way, it feels truthful, and is deeply affecting, and is incredibly tense even though you know the outcome. There is nothing schlocky about it at all.