Murder obsession: Stanley Tucci in Inside Man examines evil in us all

Frightfully clever Stephen Moffatt returns with the new BBC drama Inside Man, a series that examines the evil inside us all.

Stanley Tucci in Inside Man

Frightfully clever Stephen Moffatt returns with the new BBC drama Inside Man. And while at times it has you wanting to throw a wine glass at the screen, shouting, “Hold on Stephen, this is simply implausible”, the four-part series is also thumping fun, fiendishly clever as you might expect from a writer like Moffat, beautifully acted, and at times, like any good thriller, pulsating with dread.

What makes people do really bad, really stupid things, he asks, and if you make a bad decision how on earth do you cover it up, usually he suggests only by making even more equally heinous choices.

What happens when someone is caught by a quirk of fate and there is simply no way out of where they find themselves? No matter how hard they try to find ways of escape, they discover that the universe has an order and no matter how hard they try, they just can’t get away from its remorseless logic.

It comes from Hartswood Films, for BBC One and Netflix, a venerable company founded by legendary producer Beryl Vertue, once agent for some of Britain’s greatest comedy creators, like Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes, as well as the performers Tony Hancock and Frankie Howerd. Recent productions of course include Moffatt’s now legendary Sherlock, Dracula, The Time Traveller’s Wife and more recently Scottish thriller The Control Room and the spooky The Devil’s Hour for Amazon Prime Video.

The new four-part series is directed by the vastly experienced Paul McGuigan (Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool), who oversaw several episodes of Sherlock and was nominated for an Emmy for the series. The Scottish director has been responsible for critical and box-office hits, and worked with some of the biggest names in the business, among them Morgan Freeman, Tom Hardy, James McAvoy, Daniel Radcliffe and Chris Evans.

And he’s got a stellar cast to work with in this new series, something that distinguishes most Moffat productions. Golden Globes winner and Oscar nominee Stanley Tucci is the main lead, best known for his roles in The Lovely Bones, Supernova, and The Hunger Games. And David Tennant, known of course for Broadchurch and Des, joins him, along with Dolly Wells (Dracula, The Pursuit of Love) and Lydia West (Dracula, It’s a Sin).

The series starts like a kind of split narrative. Three stories that look at first like they could never easily intersect eventually do just that.

A loutish, aggressive bloke (Harry Cadby) on a crowded train gazes lasciviously at a young woman, Lydia West’s journalist Beth Davenport; as it turns out this is a pivotal moment in the drama about to unfold. He starts to intimidate her as others apprehensively watch on.

No one takes any action as he starts to crudely proposition her. (“There’s always an argument which loads of cowards like me would make: that if we do nothing at all, it will just stop, so doing nothing is the right thing to do,” says Moffatt.) But then another woman takes a photograph of the harasser. “That’s assault,” he tells her, snatching her phone. “You’ve invaded my personal space and I’m deleting your assault.”

A third woman then stands up and tells him she is livestreaming his assault, and hopefully the police will be at the next station to arrest him. Other women, encouraged, stand up and also start filming him. The woman, using social media so adroitly, turns out to be Dolly Wells’ math teacher Janice Fife, who will also be pivotal to the story.

“She represents a kind of woman I know,” says Moffat. “The kind of woman who is used to manipulating fools like us with the tilted head and humility. The kind of woman who, when you go one step too far, pushes right back. She’s Ms Pushback.” At the end of the ordeal, the man in custody at the station as promised, the two women become friends, or so it seems, the journalist determined to interview her rescuer at some point.

Then Moffat introduces Tucci’s Jefferson Grieff, some kind of professor of criminology on death row for murdering his wife and cutting off her head, which still remains missing, a kind of bargaining chip. Somehow he enjoys the privileges of the US penal system. He’s attractive, intriguing and full of charm, he is Satan and he is the Serpent. It’s as if Hannibal Lecter, Professor Moriaty and Sherlock Holmes are combining their talents.

Just like Sherlock has Watson, Grieff has the imposing Dillon Kempton, a hardened criminal who has a photographic memory and who inhabits the cell next to him. (“I went to a therapist – I really opened up. She left the profession.”)

With the involvement of the prison warden, clients from different parts of the country come to Grieff to get their cases solved. Dillon attends these client meetings, mordantly amused at the goings-on, so that he can remember each and every detail by heart.

“Moral worth” is the criminologist’s only criterion for deciding which cases he will follow. “He knows – he’s solving crimes from hell,” says Moffatt. “He does believe that every human being is absolutely capable of the abominable – the advantage of the loss of everything he valued from his life is that he has the insight that strips away all the lies that sustain our illusion of security.”

Suddenly, a little inexplicitly, Beth Davenport is at the prison to interview Grieff, knocked back though because he doesn’t want to atone. Disappointed she leaves only to find a picture sent by phone from Janice that disturbs her.

Moffatt’s one of the few who can get away with this kind of extreme plotting. A joker at heart, he actually enjoys confusing us for the ­moment; nothing deters him having a little fun with us.

Now here comes the third parallel story, intersecting slightly with that of the criminologist. David Tennant is Harry, avuncular local vicar in a small British village. Everyone’s friend, he calls himself “the Funny Vicar”, though just as often, “the F--king Vicar”. He is given a flash drive to hide by his troubled young verger Edgar (Mark Quartley). Constantly in fear of his mother’s intense suspicions, his drive turns out to contain child porn.

Harry then picks up redoubtable Janice, who is his son’s Ben private maths tutor, and drives her to his home but the boy instead wants to attend a music festival.

Somehow in Moffatt’s astute engineering of events the hard drive is accidentally given to Janice. Neither Ben nor his father know what it contains but unluckily Janice takes a look and an unfortunate set of circumstances is set in motion with the unlucky maths tutor finding herself unconscious in the cellar.

Harry can’t betray Edgar but finds no way of rescuing his son either without taking the blame himself for what the drive contains.

At this stage it’s all a bit breathtaking for the viewer as disbelief almost overwhelms the story but Moffatt somehow pulls these shenanigans off – some British critics coining the term “Noir Farce” to describe the darkly amusing events. He forces us then to track the process of a possible murderer to his own demise, to which he unconsciously, or in the Vicar’s case even consciously assents. Moffatt cleverly riffs on the problems of guilt and complicity, of menace and victimisation in the most enjoyable way, even as he infuriates by his outrageousness.

There are many ideas here. Among them the notion of how hard it is to actually murder someone. It might seem the easiest thing in the world to do but when the person contemplating the homicide has the intended victim captive, how do they go about doing it, and at the same time try and factor in all the problems of being caught.

As Moffat says it is really hard. “Doing nothing is so much easier.”

It’s superbly acted by a bunch of experienced actors who know just what kind of heightened style is required here, directed in immersive style by the accomplished McGuigan, and thoroughly enjoyable. Just hold that wine glass.

Inside Man streaming on Netflix.