Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: David Tennant, Stanley Tucci, Dolly Wells, Lyndsey Marshal, Lydia West, Kate Dickie, Eke Chukwu, Boo Golding, Louis Oliver, Atkins Estimond, Dylan Baker, Tilly Vosburgh, Simon Delaney, July Namir, Mark Quartley, Cokey Falkow, Victoria Willing, Harry Cadby, Reynah Rita, Tim Berrington, Charlie Bentley, Malek Aloni, Lee Byford, Suzanne Ahmet, Amie Buhari, Sharon Sze, Aaliya James.
“How does anyone commit murder, do they think of the admin involved?”, it might be a touch irreverential and cynical, and perhaps a bleak message, but in terms of human belief, it is a phrase used by the excellent Steven Moffat in his four-part drama Inside Man, which sums up arguably more of our continued co-existence with each other than the worn out sense of basically that everybody is good; for as Stanley Tucci as Jefferson Grieff hammers home the understanding of the point of murder, we are only ever one moment away from meeting the one who will kill us.
Murder isn’t funny, it is horrific, it is damnation, and yet Death not only has a sense of humour and irony, but it also finds Time for us all, eventually. In this thought we are just conduits of a will of time, and the ones who are caught by surprise at their actions, the ones pushed beyond their mental capacity to reason by circumstances arranged against them, that is the moment of Death’s absolute reveal; that a good man, that a good woman, can, in the right circumstances, become someone else’s end.
Where some might insist that Steven Moffat’s Inside Man is contrived, that such a scenario that brings about the fall of Harry and Mary Watling, the pleasant local vicar and his wife, played with absolute conviction by the ever impressive David Tennant and Lyndsey Marshal respectively, is impossible, it must be arguably accepted most murders are drawn from the moment, an act of simple misunderstanding, a slice of time in which the mind cannot comprehend what is happening and they strike out…not all murder is premeditated, it is just a reflex of events that threaten the sanity and safety of another, of the person pushed to an extreme moment.
It is in this that Inside Man unveils the truth of its situation, a Shakesperian tragedy immersed in the modern day, and one that brings tremendous performances from the main players, especially that of Stanley Tucci, Dolly Wells, and Lyndsey Marshal. The sense of fear and constriction, the false accusation being overshadowed by the course of events, this is the drama that slams itself into the mind of all who are visited in the moment by the image of death, it is forever fleeting, but some will find their worlds shaken overwhelmingly, and it is for the Inside Man a puzzle worth investigating.
Ian D. Hall