Landscapers

Sky Atlantic’s new four-part true crime drama, shouldn’t work. It stars Olivia Colman and David Thewlis as Susan and Christopher Edwards, the “Mansfield murderers”, who in 1998 shot her parents and buried them in the garden (also amassing £245,000), and were finally sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014, with a minimum of 25 years each. Written by Ed Sinclair, Colman’s husband, and directed by Will Sharpe (Giri/Haji; Flowers), Landscapers is pretentious, wayward, hyper-conceptual – eschewing realism, shredding timelines – breaks all the rules of true crime, including the good ones. It’s also extraordinary, disquieting, beautiful; television as art.Landscapers Season 1 Download

From the off (all episodes are available to stream), we’re plunged into Susan’s reality-distorting Hollywood obsession: westerns, romances, the squandering of huge sums on memorabilia, faked letters from Gérard Depardieu. The couple are impoverished in France, having been on the run for 15 years – needlessly, as nobody noticed the victims were missing – and librarian Susan lives in idealised “scenes”, casting accountant Christopher as her screen hero. This self-protective cocoon – Susan was abused by her father – is compounded by Christopher harbouring the kind of saviour complex that’s so often a front for control; even early on, their Great Love looks more of a tarted-up co-dependency doomed to shatter under pressure. This comes when Christopher gives them up and they return to England to face the police, brilliantly played by Kate O’Flynn, Samuel Anderson and Daniel Rigby, while Dipo Ola is wonderful as Susan’s kindly solicitor.Christopher’s betrayal is the moment when Susan’s mask of meekness slips to reveal childish rage, a nastiness that reminds you that, however confused the Edwards’s story of the murders becomes, murders they still were. Landscapers itself evolves into a writhing screen-Hydra of themes, moods and techniques: from black-and-white court scenes, snowy police interviews and a full-blown western sequence, to such a comprehensive smashing of the fourth wall that players leave one set to join another. Just as you think the Edwards are being too endearingly portrayed as bunglers and innocents – “My husband and I got ourselves into a bit of a pickle” – real-life news reports cut through the whimsy like a sharp syrup.