THE MURDER AT ROAD HILL HOUSE was an excellent non-fiction crime novel which looked at a notorious murder case which took place in 19th century Victorian England. This rather derivative ITV adaptation of the novel offers a heavily fictionalised version of the story, but in adopting all of the usual clichés of the TV detective formula, it loses something in the process.
I like Paddy Considine but he can do little with his titular detective character who comes across as rather flat. The viewer is left wondering why we're supposed to care about his increasingly frustrated investigations. The rest of the staging is adequate, but the director is too obsessed with getting the details right and forgets about offering any kind of stylistic touches of his own. There's no tension here, no suspense in the telling, it's just an ordinary police procedural that you watch to see what happens. THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER almost entirely lacks the gripping, page-turning quality of the book on which it is based, so it's invariably disappointing.
I like Paddy Considine but he can do little with his titular detective character who comes across as rather flat. The viewer is left wondering why we're supposed to care about his increasingly frustrated investigations. The rest of the staging is adequate, but the director is too obsessed with getting the details right and forgets about offering any kind of stylistic touches of his own. There's no tension here, no suspense in the telling, it's just an ordinary police procedural that you watch to see what happens. THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER almost entirely lacks the gripping, page-turning quality of the book on which it is based, so it's invariably disappointing.