Annabel Scholey and Colin Morgan are watchable leads within the considerably patchy Dead and Buried
“You need to shut that down now or it will fuck you up”
The premise of Dead and Buried is definitely a powerful one. What would you do when you got here throughout the person convicted for killing your brother 20 years in the past in a grocery store automobile park? What chain response of feelings wouldn’t it set off? What plan of action would possibly it provoke you to take? For Cathy, a Northern Irish trainer, it’s an excessive response in each instances, setting in movement a tragic set of occasions that threatens to swallow up all involved.
At first it’s a mild stalking on Facebook to see the place Michael’s life is now at however it quickly snowballs into extra, ordering pizzas and sending funeral administrators to his new household’s dwelling. And as Cathy begins to catfish him with a faux identification, it’s clear she has far more on her thoughts regardless of the warnings from bestie Sally and ever-patient husband Raymie, deploying a marketing campaign of psychological torment on the person who so very wronged her.
Screenwriter Colin Bateman has tailored his personal play Bag for Life right here however while he begins off with the moody depth to attract you in, he struggles to supply sufficient dramatic heft to keep up a lot actual curiosity. Flickering flashbacks give us a way of the lives affected previously however by no means actually give us sufficient of an empathetic grounding for Cathy’s more and more chaotic plan of action, the growing orbit of which sucks in an increasing number of of these round her.
That she’s self-obsessed and barely notices that is par the course and Annabel Scholey sells this so properly, the darkish depths of Cathy’s traumatised psyche nearly painful to behold. But we’re left with too little to interact with, to essentially make us perceive why she’s doing all this and extra crucially, why we must always care. Colin Morgan is ok as Michael, working by means of his personal previous demons – when his spouse’s creepy, rich, non secular father will let him that’s – however what begins off intriguing finally ends up slightly unsatisfying. Best left within the backyard shed.