Suspect: Mind game of wits and wills

The impressive cast of this cop show turned psychological family drama will reel you in.

Joely Richardson as Jackie in Suspect.

Suspect is a new British mystery, produced in a rather unusual fashion which doesn’t make it any less compelling or psychologically gripping – though to judge from some of the local reviews, it’s certainly not to everyone’s taste.

It is to mine and I enjoyed the way the series takes a hardboiled look at the cop show as a format and to some extent redefines the conventional formula of action, character and setting. It’s also rather satisfyingly abrasive, pulpish and very well acted, even if at times the plotting requires some suspension of disbelief.

Suspect is not simply about the examination of clues, the taking of testimony and the reconstruction of a crime. It’s about the way a flawed cop, played by flinty James Nesbitt, must increasingly confront his own culpability for a life he may have wasted, and the lies he has told himself to make it possible for him to function effectively as a person. As the story progresses, he finds himself involved in a complex of changing implications that challenge his image of himself, his self-esteem and respect.

It’s from the innovative boutique production company Eagle Eye Drama and produced by former Channel 4 commissioning editor Walter Iuzzolino, also the face and curator behind the globally successful Walter Presents drama brand, which champions foreign-language series from around the world.

His co-producer at Eagle Eye is co-founder Jo McGrath, also involved in the creation of Walter Presents. Eagle Eye’s slate includes Hotel Portofino for ITV and Britbox as well as the English-language remake of the critically acclaimed idiosyncratic Belgian crime drama Professor T for ITV and PBS.

Director is the Belgian Dries Vos, best known as co-director of the internationally successful heist TV series De Dag (The Day) as well as the British version of Professor T, which follows the escapades of Ben Miller’s Professor Jasper Tempest, a genius Cambridge University criminologist coping with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Iuzzolino, now an international producer, is also a passionate, wonderfully eccentric drama fan who hand-picks classy foreign-language shows for Britain’s Channel 4, all mainstream hits in their country of origin. Walter Presents launched in January 2016 and its flagship show, Deutschland 83, quickly became the most-watched non-English-language drama of all time on Channel 4.

Suspect is adapted from Christoffer Boe’s Face to Face (Forhoret), a Nordic crime television series that a little controversially endorsed innovative ways of storytelling. The production gained traction because of its original narrative structure, selling successfully internationally.

The drama’s eight by 30-minute episodes are adapted and rewritten by the up-and-coming Matt Baker, responsible for the 2021 crime drama series Before We Die, which tells the tale of a detective growing concerned with her son’s role as an undercover informant in a murder case.

His reworking is reminiscent of the splendid Netflix procedural crime series, Criminal, which in fact covers four European countries using exactly the same format, with no kinetic special effects, shootouts, fistfights or high-speed car chases. And yet it remains absolutely spellbinding. What is so original about this 12-part anthology is that each of Criminal’s 45-minute episodes takes place entirely during a police interrogation in a brightly lit interview room, largely in real time, and focuses on the concentrated clash between detective and suspect.

Richard E. Grant and James Nesbitt in Suspect.

Face to Face follows a tortured cop trying to find the person he believes killed his daughter in a series of 23-minute episodes, each a single-scene confrontation between the detective and his suspects. The conclusion of each chapter inexorably leads on to the next.

With a few exceptions, we see each actor only once in the entire series. Boe, a director with an auteur’s reputation in Europe, wrangled some of Denmark’s best actors for the show, including Lars Mikkelsen, Soren Malling, Trine Dyrholm, and Nikolaj Lie Kaas.

Like Criminal, it’s filmed in long takes, is all about the performances, the storytelling constraints embraced and in fact actively encouraged, and is a show where actors need to be fully prepared with up to 12 pages of dialogue a day, filmed in intimate circumstances.

In Suspect, Vos also has cast a top line-up of British actors, including Joely Richardson, Anne-Marie Duff, Richard E. Grant, Antonia Thomas, Niamh Algar, Sam Heughan, Sacha Dhawan and Ben Miller. All of them relish the challenge of the format, well realised by Baker in his grainy yet stylish adaptation, and savouring the relative absence of traditional dramatic action. This means almost all the drama has to come from dialogue and the psychological battle of wits and wills that takes place between investigator and suspect.

The first episode, Jackie, finds Nesbitt’s grizzled veteran cop Danny Frater turning up at St Josephine’s Hospital Mortuary, clutching dental records, to check the dead body of a young woman who may be a missing person. She’s been found hanging in her bedroom and it looks like a suicide not a sex game gone wrong. It seems she attempted to sever an artery first.

Frater is scratchy, unappealing and obviously a dangerous character but he’s still a sharp cop, even if he’s a man who seems to be treading water. Jackie Sowden the pathologist – played with quiet insistence by Richardson, focused, serious and a little humourless – is convinced it’s a suicide but when Frater discovers the victim is his daughter, Christina (Imogen King), he can’t accept she killed herself.

She’s been found in a strange flat with no ID, that severed wrist and there are signs of drug abuse. There’s no note, but also no signs of a struggle. “Nothing about this is routine,” he shouts at the pathologist. And over the next 24 hours like a scent hound ferreting prey, he sets out on a chaotic crusade to find out what happened to his daughter, corralling those closest to her: her partner, her best friend, her business partner, her godfather, her mentor, and her mother (and Danny’s ex-wife).

Vos’s direction is fluent and visceral and takes place through what he calls a hyperreal “cinematic prism”: the London locations are all slightly embellished, baroque in tone, highly theatrical, few other characters ever visible. “We deliberately chose to observe the city and its landmarks from skewed and unusual angles, often under the bridges – so it would look and feel like an altered and more abstract version of a place strongly etched in viewers’ imaginations,” he says.

Iuzzolino says they were after a kind of “London from below” visual quality. The landscape echoes the emotional journey of the broken cop. “We wanted to capture the spirit of Edward Hopper paintings and transfer it into contemporary London, as we thought this would lend the city a palpable emotional quality.”

Vos stages these rich, complex and elaborate tableaus but never at the expense of emotional authenticity and psychological depth. In his hands everything from a clinical morgue to an empty men’s club and a racecourse at night become incredibly arresting and poetic. This creates a heightened reality, a harmonious aesthetic universe where the actors’ performances are amplified and captured with incredible sharpness.

What Baker does so effectively is make a human drama out of the process of inquiry without undercutting the power of the mystery that lies at the end. The story is really about the reflections and ambiguities of character, not so much about the complication in the scheduling and methods of the crime.

And it’s given full value by the impressive cast. Each episode was rehearsed and shot in five days, so the performers were able to immerse themselves in character with none of the usual breaks in shooting time. Grant is a standout as a nihilistic high-end criminal boss but I’m less certain about the use of Christina as a disembodied hallucinatory character guiding her father’s investigation.

“What we found particularly interesting was the fact that, in its essence, it is a powerful psychological family drama told through the narrative architecture of a crime thriller,” Iuzzolino says. “The show uses the prism of a detective investigation to tell the story of a man coming to terms with his failings as a father and husband, a man who is desperate to do the right thing and to somehow avenge the death of his daughter.”

The series is another celebration, really, of the way the detective story is so flexible, allowing for new constellations of value and style. And Suspect in its innovative fashion allows a clever moral questioning of the effectiveness of the law and justice system from an intense psychological perspective.

Suspect, streaming on SBS On Demand.