The most striking thing about The Crow Girl is the sight of young male bodies lying dead all over the place. It’s quite shocking. Those poor boys, you think. Isn’t it terrible? How could anyone … ? It has the twin effects of drawing you deeper into the plot and showing you how inured we have become to the sight of young dead female bodies used as scenery and plot points. It’s good to be reminded now and then, I think, of what we deem normal and where we draw our cultural lines and have our consciousnesses and consciences shaken awake.
Now that I’ve crow-barred that outrageous feminist point in – to business! This psychological thriller has been adapted by Milly Thomas from the Scandinavian bestseller of the same name by Erik Axl Sund. Eve Myles plays domestically harassed wife and mother (though in a far more credible way than is customary) as well as top notch detective chief inspector Jeanette Kilburn. She embarks on a case involving first one very young, very dead man – folded up in a bin bag and dumped in a gutter – then two – dumped naked outside a warehouse – then three – dumped naked in the grounds of a school. They all have multiple injuries on their bodies (one has even had some fingers bitten off) and traces of the local anaesthetic lidocaine in their systems. Their pedicured feet are in pristine condition. Oh, and at least one of the victims was frozen postmortem. It’s here I should note that the first episode opens with an anonymous figure of indeterminate sex but voiced by a woman building a special room and installing a freezer in it while talking about how her love for an unspecified but we imagine unfortunate individual is “as endless as the sea” and how if it is refused “my love will find you and I will love you whether you like it or not”.
As these clues are discovered, we are introduced to psychotherapist Dr Sophia Craven (Katherine Kelly, turning in another of her pursed-lipped Icily Glamorous Professional Woman performances which must be as frustrating for her as it is for viewers). She and Kilburn’s paths converge when the good doctor must assess a man, Carl Lowry (Trevor White), arrested for possession of child abuse images after it turns out that the first body was dumped outside his office and that Lowry is a dentist and therefore has access to … ? Yes, lidocaine.
When the second and third bodies turn out to have links to other prominent men in the local Bristolian community, suspicions of a paedophile ring grow.
In the meantime, subplots are mushrooming. Craven is searching for a patient, Victoria, who tried to kill herself during one of their sessions then vanished. This may or may not have something to do with the young woman we see semi-stalking a schoolgirl whose home life seems marked by unspeakable horrors – her father guilty, her mother complicit – or it may not. But it probably does.
A recent illegal immigrant called Amar (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva) and his comrade-in-adversity Jamal (Basel Osman) are trying to survive life in a hostile land while living in a hostel run by a terrifying gang. Eventually they are forced into cage fighting, which leads to a number of harrowing scenes and at least one link to the main plot – local businessmen attend the fights, and the fighters are given lidocaine to carry on bouts for longer.
And DCI Kilburn’s right-hand man, DI Lou Stanley (Dougray Scott) may or may not be a corrupt cop. New recruit Mike (Elliot Edusah) is made very uncomfortable by his way of working but whether this is naivety or good instincts is kept nicely ambiguous.
The Crow Girl is a very well-made, pacy drama whose overall confidence, style and authenticity carry it over the odd clunking line (“They’re talking to us,” says one character of the corpses. “But what are they saying?”) and borderline cringe-making scenes around a patient with a supposed split personality. Having seen the three episodes available for review (there are six in total), it seems poised to maintain its tension while also giving some sense of the evil men can do and the hope – increasingly available only in fiction it sometimes seems – that good people can do something about it.
