This six-part adaptation of Sarah Moss’s novel is deeply confused. The acting is melodramatic, the tone bewildering and the plot is full of cartoonishly grim situations that go nowhere
H
olidays can be murder. Regular domestic life often smothers a festering seam of incompatibility in a relationship, or a fault in an outwardly solid family dynamic. But trap people together for a week or two somewhere far away and there’s nowhere to hide. In Summerwater, a forbiddingly bleak drama written by John Donnelly and based on Sarah Moss’s novel, each of the six rain-lashed lochside cabins contains a uniquely unhappy household-on-holiday that is, on one particular day, about to endure a reckoning.
We start, as far too many dramas do, with characters being interviewed in the near future by the police. There has been a fire, but we won’t know who started it, whose cabin it was in and who died until episode six. In between is an interlinked anthology, the same day seen again and again from different perspectives. First we shadow Justine (Valene Kane), a wife and mother of two preteens.
Although it improves slightly as the series goes on, once viewers who are generous enough to stick around have got used to its bewildering tone, Summerwater reveals all its flaws in this opening episode. The central problem is that it can’t replicate the detailed inner monologues that were the book’s main selling point, and – having almost entirely ditched Moss’s state-of-the-nation political commentary – it doesn’t know what to offer instead. It lands on a sort of allusive psychodrama, with a lot of baleful blank stares and shots of Scottish trees and water looking indefinably threatening, all set to a shimmering whine of a score. Flashbacks help us piece together some kind of explanation for why Justine is so distant from her emotionally inadequate husband Steve (Daniel Rigby) and their kids, and why her obsessive long runs around the holiday village are punctuated with her trying to dispose of evidence of a crime: back in her normal life, a new colleague being given a job Justine had coveted has triggered a breakdown and a reckless campaign of revenge.
