There’s a lot going on in Possession (Sky Atlantic, Thursday), a Jamaica-set supernatural thriller that doubles as a meditation on Britain’s unresolved legacy of slavery as played out in the modern-day Caribbean. It stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Claudia, a Bristol lawyer who flies to Kingston to unravel the mystery of why a wealthy white landowner would leave his property to a seemingly random local – only for said local to claim to be a former plantation slave doomed to wander the earth.Possession has been compared to Get Out, Jordan Peele’s breakneck horror movie about how modern white America conspires to reduce black people to the status of third-class citizens but has learned to do so with a supportive smile and a hearty slap on the back. Possession is a more pungent and pacier affair: no sooner has Claudia landed in Jamaica than she is poking around a haunted mansion (the one that has been bequeathed to the elusive Cudjoe East) in the dead of night – and thus we’re deprived of Get Out’s delicious slow-burn build-up.Shocks arrive at a steady clip beginning with a surprise death early in the first episode. But director Storm Saulter is also rigorous in exploring how colonialism and the legacy of slavery have shaped modern-day Jamaica. That is a journey both for the viewer and for Claudia, whose mother is Jamaican yet who has lived her life largely in ignorance of her heritage.Where the show errs is in crowbarring in flashbacks to the plantation era. Here, annoying actors in tricorn hats and silk shirts pirouette around like extras from Horrible Histories. These scenes are intended to make real and vivid the evil of slavery – but the tone reaches too far towards sanitised ITV costume drama for the punches to connect. Instead of laying bare the horrors of the plantation system, it wedges the subject into Poldark levels of costumed panto.Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Claudia in Possession. Photograph: Sky Given the heavy subject matter, there is the obvious risk of Possession being a bit self-serious and lacking the sense of fun crucial to any good supernatural mystery. But that’s where Trainspotting actor Jonny Lee Miller comes in. He plays stuffed-shirt aristocrat Oliver Connaught (the series is presumably aware of the colonial overtones to his name), and he’s the reason Claudia is in Jamaica.It was his father, the estranged Lord Connaught, who left his estate to the cryptic Cudjoe East (Sheldon Shepherd) – hence his decision to call in the lawyers (ie, Claudia) to sort out the mess. The junior Connaught is understandably miffed and blunders around Jamaica like someone who has crashed a party they didn’t want to be at in the first place. It’s the final missing piece in a drama that tries to be both over-heated and profound and displays a commendable determination to be more than just another mindless potboiler.[ Patrick Freyne: Cagney, Lacey, Velma, Daphne – here are my favourite female TV detectivesOpens in new window ]