Dept. Q review – this excellent crime drama is a grimy, gothic treat | Television

It have to be so galling for an actor to be blessed with simply the suitable face for one sort of half. Galling for good actors anyway. Fairly candy for the others – “You need a face someone would definitely kill for? Put this useless hunk/babe in there and just move the scenery round them.”

Matthew Goode is, nomenclaturally and in any other case, one of many former, however cursed with a face finest described as “modern patrician” and has subsequently been the primary port of name for almost each interval drama there was for the final 20 years. He’s been in every little thing from Brideshead Revisited (as Charles Ryder) on the massive display screen, to Downton Abbey (Henry Talbot) and The Crown (the place at the least he acquired to play that bounder Lord Snowdon) on the small one. Judging by the relish with which he seizes the possibility to play up to date and ignoble in his new outing, the psychological thriller Dept. Q, he will need to have been going quietly mad with frustration all through.

Goode takes the a part of detective Carl Morck on this glorious adaptation by Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit, plus innumerable hit movies as a credited author or uncredited rewriter) of the Danish crime novelist Jussi Adler-Olsen’s bestselling collection of the identical title. Morck could have a aptitude for the job, however he’s a horrible man and colleague. After his ceaseless conceitedness will get a younger uniformed officer killed, and his personal accomplice paralysed by a bullet that then passes by means of Morck’s personal neck, he’s placed on long-term go away and should wrestle, probably for the primary time in his selfish life, with the concept of his mortality. That is accompanied with a rising guilt that he fights each step of the best way; watching the latter perfuse his soul because the 9 episodes unfold is at the least as compelling because the dense, twisty, cleverly structured and hideous plot enjoying out above it.

When Morck returns unwelcomed to work, he’s assigned to move a brand new division (the Q of the title). It’s set as much as examine chilly instances, within the hope of offering good optics for the troubled Edinburgh police power (granite and gothic are subbed in for snowy Nordic bleakness, which works a deal with) whereas they work on unyielding new ones, together with the seek for Morck’s attacker. His new workplace is situated within the dank, dirty basement beneath the station, in order that’s Morck instructed. Oh, and he additionally seems to be your complete division, as his boss allocates its supposed funds to the cash-strapped officers above floor.

Step by step, he assembles a motley crew to assist him. It consists of: cadet Rose (Leah Byrne), recovering from a breakdown and hoping to get away from the desk obligation she has been given; Morck’s accomplice DI James Hardy (Jamie Sives), working from his hospital mattress; and Syrian refugee and former police officer Akram Salim (Alexej Manvelov), who picks their first case – the disappearance 4 years in the past of formidable younger advocate Merritt Linguard (Chloe Pirrie). For the viewers, her story – which I believe stays the suitable aspect of voyeuristic, although it’s sometimes a detailed name – runs in parallel to the primary, although the claustrophobic could have to look at a few of it by means of their fingers.

It’s all fantastically properly, and rigorously, completed. The pacing has a leisurely confidence that some could discover a contact gradual, however permits for a character-first strategy, making a richness that amply rewards preliminary endurance. Quickly, we’re immersed in a story that includes a lacking necklace, a brutal historic beating, the perils of remoted village life, city horrors and institutional failings starting from easy incompetence to outright corruption. Plus a plentiful sprint of the psychological, emotional and bodily struggling human beings are able to inflicting on each other, within the title of affection, revenge or simply for the sheer enjoyable of it.

The performances – which additionally embody Mark Bonnar as Linguard’s unsettling boss and Kelly Macdonald as Morck’s unlucky however mandated police therapist, Dr Irving – are all first fee. (Goode, because the bearded, gaunt, more and more haunted detective, is the blackly shining centrepiece.) The script is sharp and lean, and particularly good at channelling Morck’s spitting sarcasm. Writers Chandni Lakhani and Stephen Greenhorn allow the viewers to thrill to his eager and ever-whetted edge whereas additionally making us sympathise with the colleagues who would rejoice to see him head over the aspect of the identical ferry from which Linguard supposedly fell. A barely harrowing deal with, however a deal with all the identical.