STAR RATING: ***** Brilliant **** Very Good *** Okay ** Poor * Awful
After the trauma of identifying a body that turned out not to be her child, Michelle (Vinette Robinson) absconds from her partner, Chris (Kevin McKidd) at a train station in Glasgow, and flees to London, leaving Chris in pieces. Whilst dealing with this, Chris approaches his brother, Phillip (Andrew Whipp), regarding the case of a girl who went missing some time ago. But thing's really heat up when Annabel (Iona Anderson), the daughter of Justice Minister Robert Wallace (Richard Coyle) goes missing, and Chris is plunged in to a dangerous web of deceit and betrayal.
Nearly seven years after the Brexit referendum, and nearly a good ten years after the Scottish Independence vote, politics is still as hotly contentious as ever, and so a fine framework to set a mystery thriller around, such as this adaptation of the novel by Hideo Yukoyama. With a strong, solid cast, and supporting cast, of hot Scottish talent, old and new, there's a whole web of different characters and plot strands threaded in to a fairly condensed four part thriller, that requires a bit of patience to get past the first hurdle.
However thrilling the story eventually becomes, it makes the critical mistake of having a mundane opening, that plays out in a pretty perfunctory and flat manner that doesn't bode well for what's to come, but stick with it, and somehow these characters manage to grow some meat, and play an integral part in something that crucially has a plot and a subplot, with plenty of twists and turns. It doesn't all fit organically together, but there is a genuine sense of intrigue and mystery to the story, with a decent revelation at the end.
You can't beat a good mystery, and while this is far from the best you'll ever see, it's ultimately still a satisfying affair, with some sweeping cinematography of the Scottish Highlands and a neat steady rock soundtrack thrown in for good measure. ***
