This six-part series is based on Sarah Pinborough’s 2017 novel and concerns the menacing love triangle that develops when single mum Louise (Simona Brown) gets talking to a handsome Scottish stranger, David (Tom Bateman), during a night out. His handsome Scottishness is underlined by his drink order: Macallan whisky, retailing at £12 a measure. It’s only when Louise arrives at work on Monday that she realises Dr David Ferguson is her new boss, a psychiatrist at the practice where she works as a secretary.Behind Her Eyes Season 1 Download.
Awkward. And it’s about to get more so, because he’s also married, and has moved to the area with his beautiful-but-unhinged wife, Adele, in tow (Eve Hewson, last seen starring in The Luminaries). Adele quickly forges her own bond with Louise, through their shared history of “night terrors”.
Given this theme of disordered sleep, you would expect Behind Her Eyes to visually blur the line between wakefulness and dream state, but its sense of place and character is also hazy in other, less artful ways. The setting is somewhere vaguely in London, where you can turn the corner from the Fergusons’ posh, tree-lined avenue into Louise’s council estate, but a lack of specificity means it might as well be Parminster.
Class and racial divides are broadly gestured at, but never in such as way as to illuminate our understanding of the characters or their relationships. Then there’s the “adult contemporary” soundtrack of Radio 2 playlist favourites, which only manages to deepen the impression that these guys have no distinct personalities.
It’s also not a particularly sexy show, despite sex scenes a plenty. David and Louise’s illicit trysts lack chemistry and, while Hewson smoulders entertainingly as Adele – with a particularly nice line in quivering micro-expressions captured in closeup – her emotions never properly explode. She’s drawn from that noble literary tradition of justifiably crackers first wives, but it seems her attic fire-setting days are long behind her.
Who knew threesomes could be so dull? At least this creates room to shine at the margins, and Tyler Howitt (who played Billy Costa in His Dark Materials) does as Louise’s cute and perceptive – but never precocious – son, Adam.