Review of the Week: Wolf
Gary Raymond finds some tonal problems in the BBC's new flagship crime drama, based on the international Mo Hayder best-selling Jack Caffery novels.
The title of this new grizzly BBC thriller, Wolf, puts front and centre the fairy tale macabre that promises to serve the drama so well. Families – youngsters in particular – are in peril, hunted by whatever watches from the woods. Few here are who they pretend to be, and from the off viewers are made aware that nobody can be trusted, disguises will be shed, torn off, and innocence only really exists to be tarnished and despoiled. A shame then, that this television adaptation has so many tonal problems, so little heft, and only a passing interest in the Grimms Brothers shading that was begging to be drawn out.
Mo Hayder’s source material is dark – dark dark dark – and made all the more delicious by its sense of humour. The novels are huge best-sellers, Hayder’s swaggering prose a major part of their success. She is a bold writer who enjoys her work in that contagious way that encourages the gathering of armies of loyal fans. I wonder what they will make of this TV outing.
Ukweli Roach takes on the part of Hayder’s popular DCI Jack Caffery, a detective obsessed with the man he holds responsible for the murder of his 10-year-old brother who went missing twenty years before. Roach is moody and narky and very difficult to sympathise with, snapping at chatty old men, and pushing cherished family heirloom champagne flutes off the table with a teasing sneer as he argues with his girlfriend (who, in fairness, has just dropped a bit of a bombshell on him – it’s not that Caffery reacts angrily, it’s that his anger is so controlled and incisive and… well… discomforting). Despite all this, Roach is strangely lacking in anything resembling charisma – the vacuous moral centre of the fairy tale hurricane? Perhaps. But more likely the result of some flat writing and an actor having little room for manoeuvre.
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