Do we look like MURDERERS?

Olivia Colman and David Thewlis are on top form as a genteel couple who turned out to be Britain’s unlikeliest killers

My husband and I got ourselves in a bit of a pickle,’ confesses Olivia Colman with her distinctive air of wide-eyed, genteel-seeming innocence veiling a steely resolve just beneath the surface.

It’s a trademark screen persona that, from The Crown to her Oscar-winning performance in The Favourite, has made Colman many critics’ choice as the leading British actress of her generation.

Now she’s turning to her darkest role yet: as real-life killer Susan Edwards who, with her husband

Christopher (David Thewlis, above with Colman), shot dead her pensioner parents Patricia and William Wycherley during the May Day bank holiday weekend in 1998 and managed to conceal the murders for the next 15 years.

Throughout all that time the bodies lay buried in the garden of the couple’s home in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, while Susan and Christopher siphoned off almost £250,000 from their bank account, and somehow managed to dispel suspicion over the Wycherleys’ disappearance by telling anyone who asked about the couple that they had moved to Morecambe or Blackpool.

Landscapers is far from a runof-the-mill, true-crime drama. Instead, it’s a black comedy, in which Colman and Thewlis jointly provide an acting masterclass as they play a husband and wife who are outwardly the epitome of polite respectability and are in complete denial about the terrible crimes they have committed.

As the four-part series begins, the pair have returned to Britain, having run out of money while hiding in France, and are now in custody facing murder charges – the ‘bit of a pickle’ that Susan so euphemistically describes.

Their strange fantasy existence included details so weird you might imagine they’ve been made up, but in fact they come from the documented trial. Take, for example, the series of letters supposedly from French cinema star Gérard Depardieu that in fact were all penned by Susan.

They have lied to others – and themselves – for so long that unpicking the facts proves to be a formidable challenge for police investigating the case.

Directed by the multi-talented Will Sharpe (who also made and co-starred with Colman in the dark comedy Flowers) and written by Colman’s husband, Ed Sinclair, this uneasy tragicomedy will hold you rapt as it peels back the layers of deceit to reveal these most bizarre of murderers’ true nature.