Graeme Blundell reviews: The Cave and Deadwater Fell

The challenges are relentless for Dr Amani Ballour in her underground hospital tending casualties in the Syrian Civil War

Amani Ballour, left; with Dr Alaa in the operating room in a scene from Ther Cave.

The Cave is a new Danish documentary from Syrian Oscar-nominee Feras Fayyad, whose Last Men in Aleppo followed the efforts of the internationally recognised White Helmets. Officially known as the Syrian Civil Defence, White Helmets are an organisation consisting of citizen first-responders who, dodging barrel bombs and missiles from Russian fighters, are the first to rush towards military strikes and attacks in the hope of saving lives in the Syrian civil war.

In The Cave, in a complex piece of epic cinema verite reporting, Fayyad follows another group of Syrian characters thrust into the unremitting savagery of the unfolding violence and re-creates the physical experience of war in a way few films have.

An extraordinarily beautiful panoramic shot on the outskirts of Damascus begins his film as small black missiles shoot through the held frame and begin to explode after a long eerie silence. As the camera slowly pulls down through a demolished building in a glorious piece of cinema full of dread, anxiety and foreboding, a graphic tells us how the escalating bombardment of Eastern Ghouta, an area of small towns and fertile countryside east of Damascus, has transformed the streets into battlefields and how somehow, after many people have fled, 40,000 remain trapped. “There is no way out,” we are told, as the camera reveals a subterranean network of tunnels that contain underground hospital operating theatres and wards for safety, more than 30m underground.

Its nickname for this place is The Cave and when bombing attacks by the Syrian army and Russian jets are at their worst, patients are evacuated here, supervised by the hospital’s manager, Amani Ballour, a paediatrician and managing physician in her late 20s, the central figure of Fayyad’s film, the first woman in Syria’s history to run a hospital and continually subject to patriarchal oppression and taunting sexism.

“Let’s keep smiling for the sake of the children,” she tells her colleagues during a bombing attack. “That’s the least we can do.” But the Syrian men won’t let up. A patient’s husband bluntly tells her that a woman’s place is in the home. She’s livid: “No one can tell me what to do.”

Amani Ballour treats an injured baby in a scene from The Cave.

In Fayyad’s edit he allows Ballour no breather in the disorder or from the sometimes shattering assaults from the air, no life and no reprieve outside the carnage, even as she dreams of the joys of mascara and having beautiful teeth after the war. “Is God really watching?” she wonders at one point after another attack from the air. At times she just cries alone, her scrubs spotted with blood. For Fayyad, she represents heroism in the heart of despair. “I did not want to see another white man coming in and saving the day,” he says. “I wanted to show our heroes the way they are, unpolished.”

Day after day she treats dozens of badly injured children, alongside colleagues including the urbane surgeon, Salim, who plays classical concerts on his iPhone during operations — “We don’t have anaesthetic but we have music,” he tells his patients — and Sameer, a warm and funny nurse who cooks up vats of rice for staff who imagine bowls filled with tomatoes, pizza and chocolate.

Not prepared to simply capture the horror, bewilderment and tragedy on what he calls “shaky held-held cameras”, Fayyad somehow managed between 2016 and 2018 to inveigle three cinematographers from Damascus with backgrounds in still photography who filmed the chaos and horror under his direction, embedded with the medical staff. One extraordinary sequence follows a woman in red carrying a large bowl of hot food to the hospital as a strafing attack begins in the air above her. She starts to walk more quickly, the camera following, then faster as the explosions start, the camera with her all the way through the destroyed city to the hospital as darkness descends.

Their footage was apparently smuggled out of Damascus somehow to be edited. Fayyad ended up with more than 400 hours of coverage of the underground facility capturing the disarray, the agonising violence and the insufferable claustrophobia of the earthly hellhole with unflinching authenticity. The film’s tagline, “Hope shines in the darkest places”, is certainly well-chosen if a little ambiguous in the context.

There is no beginning, middle and end story to be told here, no meaningful narrative that usually characterises this kind of immersive documentary, just the story of an unfolding nightmare as the people he films grapple with a seemingly unending tragedy. There is no voice-of-God voiceover but Ballour, the film based on her concealed diaries, provides a series of ruminative and darkly poetic narrative voiceovers that illuminate the tragedy of Al Ghouta and tie Fayyad’s footage together seamlessly.

“How can I hold back the tears while witnessing humanity being destroyed in front of my eyes,” she says towards the end before being evacuated. How can we?

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Deadwater Fell is a new British crime series from writer Daisy Coulam, best known as the writer of popular detective drama Grantchester, that amiable period series following the story of a crime-fighting Anglican vicar who develops a sideline in investigation, adapted from James Runcie’s novels and set in a picturesque village near Cambridge. Her new four-part drama, directed with neat efficiency by Lynsey Miller, is set in the small, fictional town of Kirkdarroch in Scotland and looks at the effect on two families after a horrific crime disrupts their seemingly perfect lives.

A clever montage at the start establishes the context for what occurs. The camera slowly pans across the wreckage of a burnt-out cottage, water still dripping from the blackened ceiling, then cuts to an eerily empty children’s classroom, abruptly interrupted by a wide shot of a car, hurtling at speed along a country road, that suddenly flips in the air and overturns.

We’re then quickly in the middle of a joyous village celebration after a bike race careens through the streets, people happily drinking and dancing, one couple bickering over their children. This extended sequence of bucolic innocence is ominously intercut with a forensic examination of what appears to be evidence. Could it be from the fire?

We get to know the Kendricks — husband Tom, played by David Tennant, wife Kate (Anna Madeley) and their three children, seemingly happy and content with each other — and the Campbells, a little more problematic as a unit: husband Steve (Matthew McNulty), a local copper, and his wife Jess (Cush Jumbo) and Steve’s two sons from a previous marriage.

Then one night the Kendricks’s house goes up in flames, Kate and the children found dead while Tom somehow survives. The town is devastated by grief, especially Steve, who valiantly tries to save them all. But it’s soon revealed the deaths were caused not by the fire but by a crime — they had been injected with something and there were padlocks on doors. Kate, it seems, was suffering from depression and on antidepressants and of course Tom is familiar with syringes. Are they both somehow involved or is it — as some villagers want to believe — a stranger murder, horribly, obscenely random?

A great devotee of true-crime TV, Coulam says she wanted to create a kind of fictional version of that genre, a “quiet and forensic” drama but one in which the victims of a murder are not two-dimensional.

Too often, she says, in true crime they are merely, “a fleeting image sandwiched between crime-scene photographs and interviews with their alleged murderer”. She wanted her murder mystery to be one where the victims had a voice, and also their families, neither being relegated to the sidelines. But her series is also about the way families live with secrets, and “how we look at other people’s lives and think they have it all when the truth is no one knows what goes on behind closed doors — even in the lives of those closest to us”.

Her show was never intended to be a whodunit but is really about the tragedy’s impact on the close-knit isolated Scottish community, a dismaying emotional effect felt by everyone who knew the victims. And she gives us a wilfully and intricately constructed world in which guilt and innocence are problematic.

It’s another of those characteristic British dramas like Broadchurch that so cleverly manoeuvres us into various forms of complicity with characters who even falsely suspected may begin to doubt their own innocence. And she takes us into the complex, secretive world of imperfect relationships with which we can all identify.

The Cave premieres on International Women’s Day, National Geographic, Sunday, 7.30pm. Deadwater Fell, March 19, BBC First, 8.30pm.