User Reviews

The two bodies had been so thoroughly carved and unjointed that the police later said they had a problem trying to match the correct heads with the torsos. The confessed murderer was the daughter of one of the victims and the sister of the other. The British tabloids called her "The Sculptress." Olive Martin (Pauline Quirke) was found by the police next to the family's kitchen. She was smeared with gore. The first cop on the scene, Hal Hawksley (Christopher Fulford), was so shocked at what he saw he momentarily passed out. "There was so much blood," he said. After securing Olive Martin's confession and seeing her sentenced to life imprisonment, Hawksley was still so shaken he retired from the force and used his savings to purchase a small inn and restaurant on a scenic bit of coast, but far from people. Olive Martin has been in prison now for three years. Olive has never said why she killed her mother and sister and in such a horrendous way.

Rosalind Leigh (Caroline Goodall) is an author who hasn't written much lately. She had been married to a drunk, and their eight-year-old daughter had been killed in a car crash while her drunken husband was driving. Now, divorced, she can't do much of anything. Then her editor tells her she wants Roz to write a book about Olive Martin. Get to know her, get her to talk, see who she is, find out "why." Reluctantly, Roz agrees. Olive Martin turns out to be an obese young woman, not too well educated, defensive, sly, vulnerable, manipulative and, quite possibly, a fine liar. To Roz's surprise, she begins to think that Olive Martin just may be innocent. And if Olive Martin didn't murder the two victims, who on earth could have and why so terribly? To find out, Roz starts talking to those who knew Olive and Olive's family and who remember Olive's father, a wealthy man who died shortly before the murders. She meets Hawksley at his inn and discovers someone is trying to put him out of business so he'll sell his property. She meets the lawyer who defended Olive, perhaps not too well, and who also is the trustee of the money Olive's father left to an unknown child somewhere in Australia. She talks with the neighbors, a man who might have been more than just friends with Olive's father, and the man's wife, a nervous woman who needs to clean. There's a rich property developer who is far too smooth by half. And there is Roz' husband, who seems eager for forgiveness and to be taken back into Roz' bed.

Most of all, there is Olive Martin...this huge, soft woman, with a face that can look so cheerful one moment and so resentful the next, whose mother ignored her and whose attractive, boy- hungry sister made merciless fun of her. We learn that Olive Martin had a secret lover, that she became pregnant and that her sister found out. And now Olive Martin sits in prison, sometimes sullen, sometimes angry, sometimes weary. She steals thick candles from the prison chapel and secretly carves them into figures. The chapel priest doesn't know; he's too busy speculating about Olive in ways that make us uneasy and which Olive uses.

This British TV thriller does a fine job of combining quick-paced and sometimes violent investigation, varied psychological motives and gruesome murder. The weakest element is the two sub-stories. Roz' confrontations with her ex-husband and her flash-backs to her daughter serve only to bring the main story to a halt whenever they occur. They don't add to the story and they add very little to our understanding of Roz. Their purpose seems only to periodically throw up overly dramatic moments for Goodall. The sub-story concerning Hal Hawksley's inn has a tangential relationship with the main story, but not enough to keep us guessing about things. Both threads are marginal. What makes The Sculptress work so well is the character of Olive Martin and the performance of Pauline Quirke in the role. From the moment we first see Olive Martin, keening in her tent-like, blood-drenched flowered dress, her face and hands smeared with blood, we know we're in for something unnerving and unusual. We never really identify with Olive. She seems too sly even when she seems to have been taken advantage of by a number of people. When Roz and Hal Hawksley, now in love, finally separate the threads in this story and identify the murderer, we can't help but feel good when Olive is released and greets Roz with a smile of pure, innocent joy. But does that smile change a bit into something a little too knowing? The drama leaves us satisfied...but I'm not sure I'd offer Olive a job in a butcher shop.

Very well done, tragic story about a plain, unbelievably obese woman named Olive who is imprisoned for the murder of her mother and sister.

A reporter, Caroline Goodall, is assigned to tell Olive's story and slowly the story emerges.

Then we are told what all we were told isn't true. Complete turn-around.

Was Olive impregnated by her own father and she had an abortion, or was her father a homosexual? Christopher Fulford plays the first unfortunate officer who arrives at the scene of the crime and immediately faints.

He manages to come to with no harm done to him by the ever-present Olive.

In fact, Olive opened the door for him and directed him to the kitchen where he found the bodies.

So if Olive had killed her mother and sister, why didn't she kill the officer when he was unconscious? Wonderfully done story with turns that should have been apparent all along.

Thrown into all of this is a slick businessman who is using money that rightfully belongs to Olive for his own ventures.

We are given a solid conclusion to the story, but then as Olive and the officer catch one another at the end, there still seems to be doubt about what he has been told to believe.

Strange there are no other responses on this very good murder mystery drama.

I guess no one likes to feel sympathy for a plain, obese woman in jail for murder.