Ailbhe Keogan’s adaptation of Louise Kennedy’s award-winning debut novel, Trespasses, takes you back to Northern Ireland in 1975. There’s the regulation 1970s colour scheme: slate-grey skies, sickly yellow street lighting and swirly, sticky-looking patterned carpets. There’s the music, from Van Morrison to Paper Lace. And there’s the sectarian tensions humming around the small town of Holywood, outside Belfast: army checkpoints, rubble-strewn streets, ominous silhouettes in parked cars, not a moment’s peace for anybody.
A love story buds in the pervading unease. Lola Petticrew (who portrayed IRA volunteer Dolours Price in the Troubles-era drama series Say Nothing) plays twentysomething Cushla, a Catholic schoolteacher. Her widowed alcoholic mother – an abrasive, sometimes witty turn from Gillian Anderson – is a slurring mess of bitterness and hidden gin bottles. At school, one of Cushla’s pupils is from an ostracised Catholic-Protestant family with a father so savagely beaten he’s left a husk.Cushla helps in the pub owned by her brother, Eamonn (Martin McCann), where drunk soldiers paw her. It’s there she meets Michael (Tom Cullen), a Protestant barrister known for defending brutalised Catholics in court.
David Lyons as Brian Abbott in The Beast in Me
Interestingly, Michael isn’t an unblemished hero; older, married, a posh-boy smoothie with a reputation for womanising, he’s a character who could tip easily into sleaze and self-interest. At least one of his friends, Victor (Barry Ward), regards their connection with a cynical eye. Cullen is wise to play Michael quietly, letting you see him through Cushla’s lens, to explain how they end up in his flat having bold sex with the curtains open. Cushla is clever and capable, bothered but not unravelled by the complications of being with Michael. When terrible news arrives, stabbing a hole through the drama, she bears it because she must.
Staged over four episodes, Trespasses avoids the mistake of using the Troubles as background titillation to add an extra frisson to a problematic liaison. As well as the titular “trespasses” – religion, clandestine love – it shows violence and fear seeping into every nook and cranny of daily life, demoralising and destroying on both sides of the divide. Cushla, on whom everything hinges, is wonderfully played by Petticrew, not just as a young woman in love, with the trailing hair and secret smile of a textbook romantic heroine, but also pragmatic and wary, having seen and borne too much. The result is a tale of forbidden love that cannot transcend its stark setting and is all the more devastating for it.
On Netflix, the new US mystery thriller The Beast in Me stars Claire Danes, who played the brilliant, damaged CIA agent Carrie Mathison in the Middle Eastern espionage thriller Homeland. Howard Gordon, who helped develop the latter series, is the showrunner. Danes is cast as lesbian author Aggie, who’s yet to match her early literary success. Living in a huge, crumbling house in an upmarket riverside district, she’s broken by the death of her young son in an accident involving a drunk driver. Aggie is intrigued despite herself by her new neighbour, the brash and immoral property player Nile (Matthew Rhys).
Rumours swirl about his involvement in the disappearance of his first wife and whether he got away with murder. Bantering together (“I should hang out with more dykes”), Nile goads Aggie into writing her next book about him: “People don’t want hope ... People want gossip and carnage.”
Created by Gabe Rotter and partly directed by Antonio Campos, who helmed the true crime drama The Staircase starring Colin Firth, The Beast in Me is lent a foreboding atmosphere with harsh lighting, abrupt shifts in tone and discordant music. Danes dances between anxiety and determination in a story that eventually asks if Aggie, too, is guilty. There’s a touch of Patrick Bateman to Nile’s moneyed, warped exterior. He is also a Hannibal Lecter-style showman, tearing into meat held in his hands: “We have eyes in the front and sharp teeth. We are predators.”
At first I enjoyed it, particularly Rhys’s studied cruelty (“You haven’t published anything since your little boy died. That can’t be easy”) and the supporting cast is strong, including Jonathan Banks as Nile’s father and David Lyons as an FBI agent. Sadly, stretched out over eight episodes, the series is derailed by an unwieldy thread about corruption in high places. The Beast in Me ends up disappointing: a bloodthirsty potboiler with a congested plot.
Christine Flack in the Disney+ docuseries about her daughter Caroline
The two-part Disney+ docuseries Caroline Flack: Search for the Truth is about the former Love Island presenter who took her own life at the age of 40 in 2020, distraught at facing charges for the assault of her boyfriend Lewis Burton in December 2019. The docuseries is built around Flack’s mother, Christine, and her pursuit of the truth. Upset by text messages from another woman, Flack said she woke a sleeping Burton by hitting him with a phone – one was found damaged at the scene – and, somehow, this turned into him being hit with a lamp. While Burton didn’t require hospital treatment, Flack cut herself, with images later appearing in the media as if the blood belonged to Burton. She subsequently lost her job presenting Love Island.
Central to the docuseries’s thesis is that an incident that would ordinarily have resulted in a caution – Burton refused to press charges – escalated into a charge and a prosecution. Christine feels that an example was made of her daughter because of her fame. This is tough, complicated viewing, featuring interviews with Flack’s family, her friends, plus journalists and legal experts, and requisite disclaimers, including from the Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan police (the latter have apologised for not making proper notes).
It’s also a tale of media fascination with Flack and the presenter’s long-term mental health issues. Questions have been raised about the ethics of making this series, but softly spoken Christine feels Flack would have approved and only wishes she’d done it when she was alive.
“That’s my biggest regret – that I wasn’t shouting like this then.” Ultimately, this is about a mother mired in grief, still trying to look after her daughter.
Barbara Ellen’s watch list
Rachel Sennott stars in I Love LA
Wild Cherry
(BBC One)
Bafta-winning Nicôle Lecky is the creator and star of a sharp, modish thriller about ambitious working mothers embroiled in a complex fracas at a boarding school.
I Love LA(Sky Comedy/Now)
Created by and starring US actor Rachel Sennott, this is a caustic comedy about a group of chaotic friends. Like a Los Angeles-based Girls, it is also reminiscent of Pen15 and Broad City – and it’s genuinely funny.
Kingdom
(BBC One)
More awe-inspiring natural-world fare narrated by David Attenborough. The series focuses on animal families in Africa: lions, leopards, wild dogs and hyenas.
Photographs by Peter Marley/Channel 4/HBO/Netflix