There are the remote, gusty glens; the wind turbines standing like dispassionate sentinels; the haunting soprano and mournful strings on the soundtrack; a body left naked and posed in prayer. And, naturally, there are two mismatched detectives: in this case, the coolly detached but clearly burdened DI Monica Kennedy (Laura Donnelly) and her new partner DC Connor Crawford (Mark Rowley), all charm and skinny-fit shirts.
But where The Dark parts company is in its treatment of the antagonist. The masked murderer here has more than a touch of the slasher-movie monster about them. Early on, Kennedy theorises that the killer may have spent hours lurking at a crime scene, patiently waiting for their handiwork to be discovered.
Surveillance then becomes a recurring motif, with a steady stream of those predatory POV shots made famous by Halloween – moments where the camera stops behaving like a neutral observer and instead adopts the perspective of some unseen malevolent presence.
Yet, despite those Michael Myers flourishes, the killer ultimately feels closer to Ghostface than an unstoppable force. Like the hooded phantom from the Scream franchise, this assailant is fallible: it turns out they can be kicked, punched, hurt and sent sprawling over furniture, creating a welcome unpredictability during one showdown with a would-be victim. Throughout the sequence, it genuinely feels unclear who’s going to gain the upper hand.
It’s a move that inevitably results in the killer making things personal by leaving a corpse on Kennedy’s doorstep, something she really ought to have seen coming given that she spends much time profiling the person she’s hunting. But dramas such as this almost require a degree of unsettling intimacy between detective and killer; eventually the hunt must come closer to home. To satisfy that demand, Kennedy is given a young daughter, Lucy, whose chief narrative purpose appears to be finding herself in peril.
It’s in these smaller moments and fleeting glimpses of the perpetrator that The Dark is at its most chilling, though some of its other tricks begin to feel more well-worn. A dark lair adorned with taxidermy? Bible quotations? A troubled young man producing disturbing artwork? At times it resembles a psychological thriller starter kit.
Still, after so much football and tennis clogging up the schedules, familiarity is easier to forgive when it arrives wearing a mask and skulking in the shadows. The Dark may not reinvent crime drama, but the goosebumps it generates may take a while to subside.
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