![]() Everything is shot in a bleached, drained fashion. The photography too is worthy of mention. Marsan has one of those faces that you could stare at for hours and he puts it to good use here, alternatively cajoling and twinkling, ranting and raving in his determination to get a result. As well as Morrissey and Lloyd-Gregory there is Aidan Gillen playing the maverick pathologist Phil Hendricks Natascha McElhone as Willetts’s doctor, Anne Coburn the creepy anesthetist Jeremy Bishop (Stephen Campbell Moore), and, for me, the pick of the bunch, Eddie Marsan as Kevin Tughan, Thorne’s driven, wounded partner of old. Thorne: Sleepyhead is blessed with a very strong cast. Is it him? Is it him? And yes it is, but no it’s not. Everyone is a suspect and the camera teases us, knowingly. There are any numbers of skeletons jangling in any number of closets. Loaded looks, sly eyes: everyone looks shifty, uncomfortable. There are red herrings and mixed messages in abundance here. Everyone else thinks differently, and there’s a strong belief that it’s the work of a copycat killer, using as his rubric the awful case of Frank Calvert, who killed his daughters years previously. ![]() Thorne is convinced that this state of suspended animation is precisely what the perpetrator is aiming for. We discover, before long, that Thorne too is a prisoner of sorts, having buried deep within him a secret that is closely connected to this case. By the gut-wrenching end, we know and care about Alison, which makes what has happened to her all the more appalling. Alison has her own monologue and it is a compelling one. One of the interesting aspects of this series is how the victim is not merely the spark for the powder keg plot. Which is not to say that Alison does not have a voice. He wants his victims to be these grotesque waxworks, uncommunicative but alive, prisoners within themselves. What at first appears to be the work of a killer who has slipped up by not finishing off his latest victim turns out to be the chilling opposite: the deaths he started out with were unintended. The fourth victim, Alison Willetts, in a superb performance by Sara Lloyd-Gregory, survives, but has suffered a brain stem lesion, leading to “locked-in syndrome.” Alison can see and hear, but she cannot feel, she cannot speak. So begins this nightmare, which is at times exhilarating, unbearably tense, and truly frightening. His quarry runs into a house in a desperate bid to escape…and trips over a corpse lying on the kitchen floor. He’s the first person we see, huffing and puffing as he chases down a felon. But what makes Thornestand out is the pace, the acting and the classy directing from Stephen Hopkins, who kept Jack Bauer on his toes in 24.ĭavid Morrissey plays DI Tom Thorne, and just a few minutes in, like Rathbone’s Holmes or Connery’s Bond, it’s difficult to imagine another face in the role. Plain-clothed rogues battling against the clock or glacial, grizzling Scandinavian detectives. There are a lot of police procedural dramas out there. It’s one of those packages in which pretty much everything comes off. That changed with Thorne: Sleepyhead, adapted from Mark Billingham’s extraordinary debut thriller. I’ve got stuff on there from before last Christmas….I’d rather read, or watch a film, or play football with the munchkins. But these days I’m filling up the hard disk with recordings I’ll never get around to watching. More recently I was glued to the screen for the excellent, underrated series The Cops, which lasted a mere two series, and the superb Red Riding adaptations, as well as Five Daughters, the draining, but brilliant, exploration of the destruction Ipswich serial killer Steve Wright wreaked on the families of the women he killed. Towards the end of that decade, became something of a TV addict by default while working as a reviewer for Time Out magazine. I was addicted to Crackerback in the late 1990s. I used to, when there were fewer channels, fewer commitments, fewer mouths to feed….Woe betide anybody who stood between me and Steve Austin when I was a kid in the 1970s. To learn more about the television series visit the mini-site or download the mobile app. Mulholland Books will publish a Detective Thorne novel by Mark Billingham, Bloodline, in July 2011. Sky1 is airing a series of shows based on Mark Billingham’s Detective Thorne books. Recommendations from the African Diaspora.Workman Publishing Arrow Icon Arrow icon.Little, Brown Books for Young Readers Arrow Icon Arrow icon.Little, Brown and Company Arrow Icon Arrow icon.Hachette Nashville Arrow Icon Arrow icon.Grand Central Publishing Arrow Icon Arrow icon.
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