Wow, just completed Edge of Darkness. Most dark, eh?
A bit bloody weird too. But very gripping.
There's a lot of odd stuff in there - an off-kilter, but ultimately heart-rendering single-dad / daughter relationship; the tenderness at the heart of a ruthless cop, who cut his teeth grooming IRA informers. His technique for extracting confessions involves cultivating intimacy with his captive, to the extent of hand-holding and even kissing.
It has a very menacing, verging on psychedelic, aura to it. The main character himself seems to be both stoically focused, and completely unable to fully piece together what's going on around him (it has to do with the surreptitious acquisition of nuclear fuel).
9 puzzling bureaucratic points out of 10.
One of my very favourite things about it is how the characters enter our screen fully formed, but there is so little exploration of back-stories. The work has obviously been done, but to add depth to performances, not to show off. Similarly there is an impressionistic, sometimes pointillistic, approach to plot movement. Motivations are there, but there is by and large no tedious exposition. We learn things as Craven learns them, and often we learn them from his expressions not his words.
Of course there are some larger-than-life characters in it, but many of the cast are simply set back in relief, and help provide tonal richness, or else allude to past events, tying Emma's thread
then with her father's
now. And I so enjoy how other people have stories unfolding for them, but which are never - at all - explored. It's a writer confident in the truth of the story he is writing, who sacrifices other good ideas as background noise, incidental colour, narrative texture.
As you mention, the father-daughter stuff is some of the most evocative - for example,
that scene in her room; his recurring memories of her; how banal little details cling to him (ratatouille in a tin).
And whilst there are limitations to some aspects of visually presenting some of the story convincingly, considering it was made at a time when television drama (even of the highest quality) was still dominated by a couple of people talking, at length, in a studio set, there are great bursts of on-location action, which punch the viewer in the gut with their viscerality and suddenness.
Words must also be had over the sound design and score, which at times remind me of
Idi I Smotri in their power - recurring motifs, degenerating hearing, diegetic music, simplicity.
.
(unless they were all really bad actors).
