Anyone expecting a detailed police procedural might be disappointed. Ian Brady (Harris) and his girl friend, Myra Hindley (Peake), picked up and killed a number of children in the vicinity of Manchester and buried the bodies on the nearby moors. You have never seen such desolate places as the moors -- occasional rocky outcroppings, black and muddy lowlands, and hill after hill of chill windswept grass. The only thing missing is Baskerville Hall. Manchester is a grimy old city of brick, residue of the industrial revolution.
The dialect isn't easy to interpret, not for me anyway. "What about her?" becomes "Wha a Bow Wow?" There's not even a helpful glottal stop after "Wha". But the film at least spares us the pleas and screams of the murdered children. These two maniacs taped their killings. The tapes are mentioned in passing but not heard, as if they were just another minor piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
And, when you come right down to it, it isn't so much the story of the two murderers, Brady and Hindley, but rather the tale of Hindley's anguished sister Maureen (Froggatt) and her not-too-bright husband David Smith (McNulty). The two killers try to involve David in some scheme to rob a bank and, evidently to show him they mean business, Brady slaughters an innocent captive with an axe, while David gapes.
The two Smiths run to the police. Brady blames Smith; Hindley has nothing to say. Some of the bodies are discovered, Brady is sent up for life and so is Hindley. But all of that is almost beside the point, as we watch the Smith family suffer the outrage of the community, spat on, their apartment vandalized. Mostly we follow the entirely innocent Maureen, uncertain about her husband's involvement, grieving over the recent loss of her baby.
There are multiple shots of cute newborn babies, inserts of toddlers, weeping of adults, arguments, split-ups, and reconciliations. It begins to resemble the story of Maureen and David, already down on their heels, having their lives irreparably damaged by two interfering nuts.
The photography is splendid and the direction competent, except for all those baby shots, which threaten to turn the story into a a family movie of a kid's literal birthday. And the doubts and spats between Maureen and David echo those found on afternoon domestic dramas.
But the acting can't be faulted. There's no weakness in the casting either. As Ian Brady, the philosophical brains behind the affair, a devoté of Nietzsche and de Sade, Sean Harris delivers the goods. He's all nose and no chin, and has the personality of a glacier. Peake, as Hindley, wears the tarty make up and peroxided do of the early 1960s. She's actually an attractive woman under all that plaster but has the ability to transform her features into a mask of hatred when the situation demands it.
It's a nice job but it's also slow and spends too much time on peripheral figures. The Smiths' problems could have been sketched in less time. What many of us would like to know is what impelled Brady and Hindley to murder young children they'd never met before. We can put ourselves in the place of someone who murders a spouse or a friend. Those victims are people whose opinions we care about. They can hurt us. But serial murders are preposterous. The causes don't lie in Neitzsche or de Sade. Those only serve as justifications for things Brady already wanted to do. But we get no insight into his character, and scant insight into Hindley's.
The dialect isn't easy to interpret, not for me anyway. "What about her?" becomes "Wha a Bow Wow?" There's not even a helpful glottal stop after "Wha". But the film at least spares us the pleas and screams of the murdered children. These two maniacs taped their killings. The tapes are mentioned in passing but not heard, as if they were just another minor piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
And, when you come right down to it, it isn't so much the story of the two murderers, Brady and Hindley, but rather the tale of Hindley's anguished sister Maureen (Froggatt) and her not-too-bright husband David Smith (McNulty). The two killers try to involve David in some scheme to rob a bank and, evidently to show him they mean business, Brady slaughters an innocent captive with an axe, while David gapes.
The two Smiths run to the police. Brady blames Smith; Hindley has nothing to say. Some of the bodies are discovered, Brady is sent up for life and so is Hindley. But all of that is almost beside the point, as we watch the Smith family suffer the outrage of the community, spat on, their apartment vandalized. Mostly we follow the entirely innocent Maureen, uncertain about her husband's involvement, grieving over the recent loss of her baby.
There are multiple shots of cute newborn babies, inserts of toddlers, weeping of adults, arguments, split-ups, and reconciliations. It begins to resemble the story of Maureen and David, already down on their heels, having their lives irreparably damaged by two interfering nuts.
The photography is splendid and the direction competent, except for all those baby shots, which threaten to turn the story into a a family movie of a kid's literal birthday. And the doubts and spats between Maureen and David echo those found on afternoon domestic dramas.
But the acting can't be faulted. There's no weakness in the casting either. As Ian Brady, the philosophical brains behind the affair, a devoté of Nietzsche and de Sade, Sean Harris delivers the goods. He's all nose and no chin, and has the personality of a glacier. Peake, as Hindley, wears the tarty make up and peroxided do of the early 1960s. She's actually an attractive woman under all that plaster but has the ability to transform her features into a mask of hatred when the situation demands it.
It's a nice job but it's also slow and spends too much time on peripheral figures. The Smiths' problems could have been sketched in less time. What many of us would like to know is what impelled Brady and Hindley to murder young children they'd never met before. We can put ourselves in the place of someone who murders a spouse or a friend. Those victims are people whose opinions we care about. They can hurt us. But serial murders are preposterous. The causes don't lie in Neitzsche or de Sade. Those only serve as justifications for things Brady already wanted to do. But we get no insight into his character, and scant insight into Hindley's.