Endeavour’s Shaun Evans a charming threat in this true-crime drama
By Ben Pobjie
Until I Kill You ★★★½
Sunday, 8.30pm, ABC
Delia Balmer, living alone in London in the early 1990s, works as a nurse and finds it difficult to make friends. She has developed a hard emotional shell to protect against the disappointments of the world and the loneliness that assails her in her dingy council flat.
When she meets charming, laid-back, free-spirited John Sweeney in a pub, and finds her attraction reciprocated, her grinding life appears to be taking flight.
Shaun Evans and Anna Maxwell Martin in Until I Kill You: creeps up on you.Credit: ABC
And that, of course, is where it all goes wrong. John is not just not what he seems: as periodic cuts to a police investigation in Amsterdam make clear, he is something very, very bad indeed – and over the coming couple of years Delia is in for a growing, creeping, terrifying awareness of it.
Delia Balmer is a real person, and Until I Kill You is based on her memoir. True crime is a wildly popular genre, but a tricky one to handle in many ways. Interviews with creators of based-on-fact crime dramas will always cite the need to be sensitive and respectful of the lives involved, but the genre has a decidedly mixed record when it comes to living up to these noble intentions.
Until I Kill You does better than most, probably in large part because Delia, although a victim of Sweeney, survived to tell her story, on which the show is based. Told from Delia’s perspective, it strives to make her as a fully realised character, rather than a prop in a killer’s tale, as many similar dramas do.
Anna Maxwell Martin: utterly convincing as Delia Balmer.Credit: ABC
On the creative side, a true crime drama must face the question of how sensational to make its portrayal – making real-life crimes thrilling and salacious can create a sickly feeling for a viewer – but this is entertainment. There’s no point making a show if you’re going to mute the events to the point of dullness.
Such shows exist because we are, for better or worse, fascinated by the most horrific human behaviour, and pretending otherwise would be disingenuous.
Until I Kill You creeps up on you with its horrors. The development of Delia and John’s relationship is depicted with short scenes with spaces of months between them – the deterioration is illustrated as much by the slow collapse of Delia’s emotional state as by the events themselves. The certain knowledge that something is very, very wrong grows deeper and darker, crawls upon your skin … then explodes.
As charming psychopath Sweeney, Shaun Evans is superb. A million miles away from his clean-cut detective in Endeavour, Evans makes it quite easy to believe someone could fall for Sweeney, and just as easy to believe in his turn to monstrous violence in an utterly chilling performance.
However, the star is Anna Maxwell Martin as Balmer, a spiky, awkward character, difficult to warm to, rather than a conventional TV heroine. She struggles to relate to other people, going through life with a studied defensiveness clearly borne of a lifetime of failing to crack the social interaction code.
Maxwell Martin captures her complexity: world-weary, misanthropic, lonely, hopeful, sweet and funny by turns. Then, of course, as Delia’s life spins into nightmare, there is terror and desperation, and almighty courage and strength to come.
If anything elevates Until I Kill You above most true crime fictionalisations, it’s the combination of choices made by Maxwell Martin and writer Nick Stevens in bringing to the screen an extraordinary and quite unconventional protagonist – doubtless the real-life Delia Balmer is owed a tip of the hat here too.
The temptation is to label as “important” a show of this genre – a vital contribution to the discussion about violence against women and how we as a society deal with it. But to lumber a TV drama with such a weighty label is to give it too great a burden, especially given TV necessarily deals with only the most unusual and eye-catching stories.
Better simply to say that Until I Kill You is a compelling story, sensitively but grippingly told, and as such will contribute to our shared understanding of the world, as difficult as it is sometimes to look at unflinchingly.
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