It’s fitting that Ruth Wilson’s Sarah Trafford is an art restorer in the stylish and involving Apple TV series “Down Cemetery Road,” the new drama from the creators of “Slow Horses.” Just as Sarah searches for tiny tears and flaking and other flaws in mostly pristine and engrossing paintings, if we look too closely at the plot machinations in this conspiracy thriller, we’ll find a host of convenient coincidences, plausibility-stretching developments, and familiar tropes of the genre. But if we’re willing to take a step back and just go with it and not get bogged down in the details, this is powerfully entertaining stuff, filled with satisfying twists and turns.
Also great: we have Emma Thompson as the detective Zoë Boehm, who has spiky hair and an even spikier personality, and carries herself as if she had fronted a killer punk-rock band in the 1980s and is still looking for a fight at every turn. What superb and natural work, as if we’d expect anything less. Whether Thompson as Zoë is cracking wise, butting heads with people who think they’re a step ahead of her (they’re not), or letting her guard down for just a moment, it’s a performance to be marveled at and treasured.
Wilson does lovely and nuanced work as Trafford, who pedals her bicycle around Oxford and the surrounding suburbs, including her daily commute back and forth to that job as an art restorer (cue “Every Time the Sun Comes Up” by Sharon Van Etten on the soundtrack as she zips around). Sarah enjoys a comfortable life with her husband, Mark (Tom Riley), a hedge-fund manager who clearly puts his career ahead of Sarah, but we can see the restlessness and anxiety in Sarah even before the shite hits the fan and all hell breaks loose in her life.
The Traffords are hosting a small dinner party attended by a snooty and wealthy potential client of Mark’s named Gerard Inchon (Tom Goodman-Hill); Gerard’s wife Paula (Aiysha Hart); and Sarah’s bohemian friends Denise aka Wigwam (Sinead Matthews) and her partner Rufus (Ken Nwosu), when an explosion literally down (the fictional) Cemetery Road leaves a 5-year-old girl named Dinah (Ivy Malaika Quoi) injured and orphaned. When Sarah tries to deliver a handmade “Get Well” card from one of Wigwam’s children to Dinah in the hospital, she’s quickly ushered out and bumps into Gerard, the wealthy investor, who seems an odd coincidence.
After Dinah goes missing, Sarah becomes obsessed with finding her, even though she’s never met the little girl, enlisting the services of the downscale, husband-and-wife private eye team of the sardonic Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson) and her affable if slightly daffy husband, Joe (Adam Godley). They usually take on low-profile and slightly seedy cases, e.g., tailing husbands who are cheating on their wives, but soon find themselves embroiled in a high-stakes mystery. (“Maybe this case could go all the way to the top,” says Zoë. She’s being sarcastic, but she might not be wrong.)
Off we go. Was it really a gas main explosion in that house, or something more sinister? Who was the mysterious man Sarah spotted lurking near the site? Why are the police stonewalling Sarah’s attempts to get answers? With crisp editing that moves the multi-faceted story along at a brisk pace, and a striking use of locales including the cathedral city of Bristol, the county of Somerset, and the fishing village of Polperro, “Down Cemetery Road” becomes a two-hander, with Zoë reluctantly teaming up with Sarah to find Dinah. Then it expands into a much larger conspiracy mystery, as the body count begins to pile up. At times, the almost comedic misadventures of Zoë and Sarah don’t mesh seamlessly with a storyline reminiscent of series such as “The Terminal List” and “Special Ops: Lioness,” and it’s a bit of a task to keep up with the various storylines.
Nathan Stewart-Jarrett is a formidable presence as Michael Downey, a former soldier struggling with the aftereffects of his service. Darren Boyd is a darkly funny yet chilling presence as the dapper, utterly soulless “C,” who runs a shadowy government department. In perhaps the most electric performance outside of the leads, Fehinti Balogun plays Amos Crane, one of the most terrifying guns-for-hire this side of Anton Chigurh; this man ends lives as casually as if he’s tying his shoes, and has the cold relentlessness of a shark in bloody waters. (In a misstep of script, the outstanding actor Adeel Akhtar is saddled with playing a comic-relief middle-management government operative who is mostly irritating and gets too much screen time.)
“Down Cemetery Road” is chock full of sharp one-liners, but also some impressively staged action scenes, highlighted by an extended sequence on a train where Zoë engages in some clever and at times desperate measures to elude a dogged pursuer. I also liked how Wilson’s Sarah doesn’t suddenly become an action hero capable of scaling barbed wire fences and handling a gun with the ease of a professional. She is a lost and troubled soul who will do anything to find a little girl, and while she’s in over her head and constantly placing herself in harm’s way, there’s a sense of freedom she feels in finally finding a sense of purpose in her life.
All eight episodes were screened for review. Episodes run Wednesdays on Apple TV.
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