You don’t have to dig too dig to find the
pagan roots in rural England. It might look like All Creatures Great and Small on the surface, but it’s The Wicker Man underneath. At least such
is very definitely the case on Nathan Appleby’s ancestral estate. He has just
moved back with his second wife Charlotte in hopes of starting a new family,
but their plans will be jeopardized by a malevolent force in creator-screenwriter
Ashley Pharoah’s six-episode limited series The
Living and the Dead (trailer
here),
which premieres this Thursday on BBC America (who will release all six episodes
on their app the following day, for Halloween binge-watching).
Nathan Appleby is a Victorian psychologist,
who always believes there is a scientific explanation for all of life’s mysteries—or
at least he used to. He has not spent much time on the estate since his son
Gabriel’s drowning accident. Appleby never really got over it, nor has he ever
pretended otherwise, yet the headstrong Charlotte Appleby married him anyway.
Despite their lack of experience, she convinces him to maintain the estate as a
working farm. However, this may very well be a costly decision.
As soon as the Appleby power couple takes
charge of the farm’s management, a rash of mysterious accidents rocks the tight-knit
community. Perhaps most disturbingly, Rev. Matthew Denning’s daughter Harriet
starts presenting signs of spiritual possession. Trusting in his science,
Appleby starts treating the young woman, but a session of hypnotism is less
than reassuring.
There may or may not be several spirits
haunting the villages, including that of a notorious unbaptized serial killer
and a traditional healer unjustly drowned as a witch. Frankly, the village has
no shortage of bad karma, going back to an especially bloody Roundhead atrocity
during the English Civil War. The hauntings hit close to home, when Charlotte
detects the presence of Gabriel’s own ghost, but his intentions are far from
clear. Most maddeningly for her husband, his late son will not materialize in
his presence, but he keeps seeing visions of what appears to be a woman from
our era holding an iPad.
Despite some weird time-shifting business,
L&D is definitely a supernatural
drama, with pronounced Gothic inclinations. Thanks to the tight, tense helming
of Dr. Who director Alice (no
relation to Patrick) Troughton, each instalment delivers a high quotient of
chills, with the penultimate fifth episode qualifying as pretty darned terrifying.
We definitely get a visceral sense of an infernal power corrupting the land.
Colin Morgan and Charlotte Spencer are
well matched as the Applebys. At first they share some rather endearing Thin Man-style chemistry, but it is even
more impressive to watch their gradual falling-out, with Morgan rather
spectacularly putting the “strange” in estrangement. Nicholas Woodeson and
Malcolm Storry also add crusty color and gravitas, as the Rev. Denning and
estate steward Gideon Langtree, respectively. Cult cinema fans will also
appreciate seeing guest appearances from Steve Oram (Sightseers, The Canal) and Fiona O’Shaughnessy (Nina Forever) as the farm manager and
village school teacher, both of whom will be caught up in the sinister business
afoot.
