She’ll drive you crazy

Emily Watson plays a psychiatrist drawn into a chilling mind game with her patient in a riveting psychological thriller

PICK OF THE WEEK TOO CLOSE Monday to Wednesday, ITV, 9pm

Picture the most devastating of opening scenes. In the dead of night, a car is driven at high speed through torrential rain until it flies into the air and sinks into a river. At the wheel is a woman whose face is etched with despair, while behind her in the back seat are two young children almost too stunned by the sudden turn of events to register fear.

What could impel someone to commit such a dreadful act? And can any of us be sure such madness might not lie within ourselves in dire circumstances?

These are the questions forensic psychiatrist Emma Robertson (Emily Watson, main picture) is forced to ask after she is assigned to examine the driver, Connie Mortensen (Denise Gough, inset). Incredibly, Connie has survived, along with the children, but she faces decades in jail if found guilty of attempted murder.

Connie – a well-to-do, middleclass professional who’s depicted in the press as a ‘yummy mummy’ – claims to have no memory of what happened on that fateful night, and it is now up to Emma to assess her sanity.

Yet the boundaries between the two are quickly blurred and their roles soon become interchangeable, as Connie, despite her troubled state of mind, still has the cunning to sense weaknesses in Emma and plays on the dark secrets that the psychiatrist harbours about her own marriage and past.

So the stage is set for a gripping thriller (adapted from the novel by Natalie Daniels and showing over three consecutive nights), in which Watson again shows why she is one of our greatest screen stars.

Who can better depict a character possessed of profound inner strength and pride yet still troubled by her own demons?

Alongside Watson, Gough more than holds her own. Having earned renown in the theatre as a two-time Laurence Olivier Award-winner, she presents us with the beguiling conundrum of a character who, despite a glint of madness in her eye, may still be far saner than she wants to let on.

Enjoy the teasing clues and guessing game of a torrid, page-turning thriller, plus the powerhouse performances of two shining stars as characters locked together in a no-holds-barred battle on the knife edge between sanity and madness.