Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *
Cast: Rhodri Meilir, Sian Reese-Williams, Gwyneth Keyworth, Sion Alun Davies, Gillian Elisa, Nia Roberts, Ian Saynor, Victoria Pugh, Lowri Izzard, Garmon Rhys, Elodie Wilton, Owen Arwyn, Lara Catrin, Sarah Tempest, Lois Meleri-Jones, Rhodri Sion, Ioan Hefin, Mali Ann Rees, Megan Llyn, Melangell Dolma, Gwion Aled Williams, Morfudd Hughes, Jess Parsons, Manon Wilkinson, Gwydion Rhys, Beth Robert, Mari Rowland Hughes, John Pierce Jones, Wyn Bowen Harries, Mark Lewis Jones, Greta James.
We are conditioned in life by both our environment and our genes, to feel love and respect, we return it to others, suffer the hands of neglect and pain; there is a percentage of people who will turn that emotion on its head and who outwardly seek to inflict the same upon others. The sense of control perhaps masking itself in the appearance of wanting to care for someone but in reality it is destructive. A weapon in which scars are repeatedly drawn and the broken, fragile minds are turned and twisted ever deeper downwards, they are a repeating cycle in which in the end is the near obliteration of society.
It is a cycle of abuse which is not easy to capture, especially on television, where the demands of prime-time viewing are in competition with the sense of decency and respect for those who sit down in front of the medium and it is also one where if the viewer does not feel an overriding sense of compassion and empathy for the victim, then the message is lost, it is a backdrop to the actions of the perpetrator only.
Where the Wales-set drama Hidden differs greatly from arguably one of the greatest films of the 21st Century to deal with such emotional distress and psychological terror, Room, which starred a truly impressive Brie Larson, is its lack of engagement with the latest victim of the series of abductions, the young and troubled student Megan Ruddock, played with serious but underused passion by Gwyneth Keyworth. The story instead wandering too far, as if an element of spreading out the plot to include the circumstantial and the non-affecting.
Whilst the scenes between Sian Reece-Williams’ character of D.I. Cadi John and Mark Lewis Jones’ incarcerated prisoner Endaf Elwy were captivating, the innate unsettling notion of the woods and its effect on the psyche of the Harris Mother and Son relationship and the social destruction of two so called hard men as they exhibited the growing tension which comes when a daughter has been murdered, were all driven with great insight, Hidden wavered and walked off course in many respects for the eight part series to have any kind of regimented pace to it.
What could have been a dramatic insight into the psychology of captor and captive, of the surrounding abuse which drives such a person to commit such a terrible series of crimes and the detective investigation that goes on around it, was tempered by the need to string the story out, an eight part serial which would have had a deeper impact on the viewer if certain allusions to character and scenery had been cut. A drama that wasn’t always dramatic, a paradox of the detective showcase.
Ian D. Hall