1. First review ever.
2. I picked this up seriously late.
3. What what what. I shamelessly consume TV series and particularly crime / drama. So I have some experience. This was special. Really special. Short and effective. It was brutal with its honesty. Bless the Scottish accents for some edge. Layered darkness. You need to watch and enjoy. Script and acting. Photography. All top notch. Lovely find on Netflix.
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rob-stanley15 March 2018
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Dragonborn641 September 2019The characters are complex and nuanced as are the performances for most. Others like the brother Rob are marred in just being a plot device rather than fully formed person. The parents get the best stuff and while there's lots of nail biting and the furious smoking of a cigarette- and why wouldn't there be- they each unravel, piece by piece, righteousness, judgement, martyrdom, cowardice, greed and of course, hypocrisy. All of it. It's Greek tragedy.
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nigelmacdonald-971734 January 2022Wow, this was unexpectedly good, if unrelentingly bleak. It covers a whole gamut of awful scenarios and dark subject matter. It's brilliantly written and acted throughout and some of the performances are the best I've seen for ages. It really deserves a wider audience, but it might all just be a bit too heavy and realistic for some.
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TheLittleSongbird22 September 2016There will be inevitable comparisons to 'The Missing'. Will keep this comparison brief, as anything should stand on its own two feet without constant comparison, 'One of Us' is not as good. That said, while flawed it is well made and gripping in its own right.
'One of Us' cannot be faulted visually or in the production values. The Scottish scenery is like a character of its own, so beautiful yet so atmospherically remote, and one is indeed reminded of Scandinavian crime dramas such as 'Wallander' or to a lesser extent 'The Killing'. Photography is pretty exquisite too, capturing the scenery wonderfully. A broodingly moody music score always helps, and the one in 'One of Us' works well, almost cinematic-sounding but not intrusive.
Writing here has much to say about adult and sensitive topics such as euthanasia, murder, drug dealing, grief, misconduct, adultery, Parkinson's and incest and deals with it all in an incredibly intelligent, clever and non-biased way. While the storytelling is not completely flawless, for me it does have to be commended for trying to be different from other mystery dramas, focusing enough on the mystery but focusing also on the aftermath and repercussions for the families and also presenting a moral edge. There is a huge amount of atmosphere too, the production values help as well as the skillful direction, but it is high in tension and conflict with plenty of twists and turns that all feel relevant and stop the storytelling from dragging.
The denouement is intense and very affecting, though admittedly while the motive was a shock and didn't see it coming for a second the murderer's identity, after such a great job by the writers diverting suspicion onto one character to another, wasn't so much, very much strongly suspected them at the end of the penultimate episode.
As said, it is not perfect. There are parts of the drama, especially in the first episode, where there are so many revelations and so much being told that there is a danger of missing something and it occasionally feels confused. The resolution of the female police officer's story was rather illogical, in real life she would have not got away with what she did regardless of her personal situation. That's personal opinion of course. Also loved what was done with the characters, so vividly drawn and presented as characters that are both vulnerable and deeply flawed, one gets to know them so well and really care about their main situation and also other subplots that while one cares about how the drama ends one doesn't really want any of them to be the murderer.
Reception to the acting has garnered mixed opinions, being positively received by most critics but panned here. From personal opinion it was very good, and while the overwrought opinion is understandable the frenetic emoting and looking downtrodden/miserable fitted the tone of the storytelling and the nature of the situations/topics covered very well. Admittedly though, the frenetic emoting is overdone somewhat by Joanna Vanderham who occasionally comes over as robotic in the first two episodes before registering stronger when her material gets meatier. A couple of actors, such as Steve Evets, do speak low and quite quickly and when the Scottish accents are as thick as they are it is not always easy to understand. Juliet Stevenson and John Lynch however in particular give very nuanced and moving performances, Stevenson brings out her character's vulnerabilities heart-wrenchingly in the second episode and Lynch is often incredibly powerful in the last.
In conclusion, has a few problems, particularly the odd story lapse and a couple of performances that could have been better, but mostly very successful and gripping. 7/10 Bethany Cox -
Calicodreamin26 June 2020Great first episode, the rest are a bit sluggish. There's a few separate stories being told and I expected them to weave together, but in the end they were kept separate. The ending was unexpected, but felt drawn out. Good acting and cinematography.
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lucketttm9 February 2018I mostly enjoyed this mini-series, but for anyone actually paying attention to all the mysteries, the ending is incoherent at multiple levels. Here are some of the problems:
Why did Bill give Lee an envelope with nothing but his rural postal code written on it?
Having discovered that the envelope had Bill's fingerprints, why did the police believe that it proved Bill's guilt? Wouldn't they make the far more reasonable assumption that it was one of the many things Lee grabbed from Grace's flat during the home invasion? Surely, many of her things had her father's fingerprints. Why didn't Bill make this point when they came to arrest him?
If Bill paid Lee 1,500 GBP upfront for the hit, why was Lee so broke that he couldn't afford a train ticket?
If Juliet had followed through on her threat to upload child-porn onto Jay's laptop, all the files would have had a date and time stamp proving they had been uploaded while he was in lock-up, and while his laptop was in the evidence locker, giving him an alibi, and implicating her in planting the evidence. They are both smart people. Why did neither of them think of this?
After threatening to upload the child-porn to his laptop if Jay informed on her, Juliet then came very close to doing so, even though he had not yet informed on her. Why would she throw away her one bargaining chip? -
fraydalevy11 February 2018This is a totally mesmerizing series. There is almost a subplot for every character all of which interweave to reveal the bigger mystery.
Each character has realistic and sometimes horrible motives, sometimes the person is just weak. No matter, all motives are completely believable and keep the plot twisted.
Plus the acting is phenomenal. I could not recommend this show more strongly. -
jares12 August 2018Adding to what was already said under a similar headline: they had two bodies in the morgue for many days, but didn't bother to check their DNAs?
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DanAllenFilms7 October 2016The show expertly opens by making you fall in love with two newly weds who meet an untimely demise, putting you on the back foot as the audience. It can only go up from here right? Wrong. As the characters are confronted with the killer of their beloved children, one of them is capable of murder, but all of them are capable of protecting the ones they love.
Each episode delivers new twists and turns to the very end. What the final episode lacks in surprises, it makes up for in gripping performances and character turns which make for a satisfying conclusion which nicely wraps up a splendid watch of a show. -
Headturner19 February 2020I'm looking for more UK series to watch and realized I saw this and thought I left a review. Very good mystery, crime, thriller. Th guy from the fall ( one of my all time favorite's ) is in this. If you like good thrillers, who dun it's you'll enjoy this.
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sidney763 November 2021PLEASE do yourself an enormous favor and ignore every negative and even-less-than-highly positive review. This is superb! Extremely intelligent, unpredictable, twists and turns, very believable. Not scary. Not graphic. Not bloody or violent. I've watched it twice. I haven't seen anything on Netflix better than this series. This is the first review I have written. I highly recommend this series.
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bettycjung7 February 20182/5/18. This 4-episode mini-series could have been done as a 90-minutes movie, which means this was way too long. It was melodramatic throughout and the big reveal was really no big deal. A somewhat stupid ending for a 4-hour time investment. You have seen this before. Watch 1959's "A Summer Place" instead.
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gallagherkellie23 March 2020It started off really well, but the twists kept getting sillier and sillier. It keeps you guessing and on the edge of your seat so that's a good thing, it's something easy to watch if you're not going to take it too seriously.
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Lejink29 September 2016I'm a Scot so at least I enjoyed the wild scenery of my native country in this BBC four-part thriller mini-series. Otherwise, it was as appealing as a plate of cold porridge and just as indigestible.
A young newly-married couple, childhood, next-door sweethearts are found brutally murdered just after their wedding and for some reason the apparent murderer drives out to their side-by-side parents' houses, but wouldn't you know it, a storm gets up and he crashes his car just as he arrives, leaving himself at the not so tender mercies of the two families and their employees, these arranged like characters on a Cluedo board and just about as believable. Meaning of course that everyone has motive and opportunity leading into a protracted whodunit until all is revealed in the final episode.
In the background, we're then presented with the investigating female detective and her needy teenage daughter suffering some incurable disease. So, to raise money to take her child to India for a possibly life-saving operation, she dispenses some hard drugs on the sly to a local dealer, which arrangement of course was bound to tragically blow up, as it soon does, with the accidental death of a young teenager who innocently takes one from her older brother's stash.
What else, well, one of the family's sons has a fraught relationship with his wife who is a past rape victim, the nurse daughter is being pressed by an elderly, terminally ill patient to help her commit euthanasia, the deeply religious patriarch of the other family has Parkinson's Disease, plus his wife is having an affair with his chief farm-hand and their son has a crush on the afore-mentioned nurse.
My wife and I sat through all four hours of this dour, slow-moving production, without ever believing any of it. The acting was soap-opera bad by all, the dialogue of a similar dubious standard.
This was obviously an attempt at Tartan Noir, but good quality here was as elusive as Scotch Mist. -
This decade have more desolate parts of the UK created their own crime dramas, where harsh nature bears a natural supporting part, emphasizing the bad thoughts and bad deeds... Events and characters are intertwined, actors-actresses have usually no model look, creating the atmosphere of reality and letting to pay more attention on the whole cast rather than someone single and "famous".
The series in question, with main events in the Scottish Highland, includes the features above, and that is why it is generally to my liking. But as the total No. of episodes is 4 only, some supplementary events and characters are excessive, focusing on 1 crime could have been enough. The course of solving the crime is okay, the wrongdoer was not revealed too early, but the motives and background did not leave distinct impression for me. That is why I rate e.g. Shetland and Happy Valley higher than this miniseries here. -
Most series are great or terrible, evolving around characters that are too brilliant, evil, handsome, smart etc. to be true, just for your entertainment and to score 10's.
Retribution/One of us is not like that. Like The Fall, or Broadchurch, this series deserving of a realistic and solid 7, has a small cast and a small local setting, where one thing happens, which leads into the unravelling of people's pasts and secrets. A murder leads to the emotional breakdown in two families. Confronted with the lead suspect leads into actions and choices that break the families further down.
What is done so well is that they don't try to make the characters likable. Each character has his own human and unlikable side, so you won't take sides as a viewer. You'll be an observer to thei character, past, mistakes and secrets, but especially to the consequenses of their choices. The question behind everything is not so much who the killer is, but who everybody is, and why.
The deeper message seems to be: no matter how good your intention is, you're not better than someone else who commits the same crime because his intentions are worse. -
morrison-dylan-fan2 December 2016After being intrigued by the BBC trailers that made the mini-series look like an Agatha Christie-inspired Noir family Drama,I decided to start uncovering the episodes,one by one.
The plot:
A man drives to the Scottish highlands and crashes his car.Seeing the car crashed,two families who have known each other for decades,come out on the stormy night to help him out.Never having seen the guy before,the families are taken aback,when one of their addresses is found in his coat pocket.Feeling that he might be dangerous, (and with the police unable to answer calls due to the storm) the families decide to lock him in the barn yard for the night.Coming out the next morning to get info out of the night,the families discover that during the night,one of them killed him.
View on the show:
Taking place against a beautiful Scottish backdrop,the Williams steam a dour Noir family drama with a brittle Agatha Christie-style Murder Mystery in eps 1 and 4,with stylishly tinted flashbacks from director William McGregor bringing the fractured nature of the relationships out of the loyal families.Whilst the cast (which includes a great John Lynch) give gravitas to the murky revelations,the Williams clip the Noir mystery tension in eps 2 and 3 by focusing on the troubled relationships between the families running dry with forced family unease that tries to cast harsh Film Noir isolation on the families,but fails to match the burning Noir anxiety cut deep into the first and final episodes. -
jhmoondance16 January 2022Well...... I have just binge watched this fabulous powerful well written drama it was astounding. There are a few interlocking stories linked up to the main one n they are all superb. It has been a long while since I have seen something of this calibre.
The acting was excellent n the characters were so believable n fit in beautifully with the story.
The ending was a completely gobsmacked experience n totally unexpected n unpredictable.
I highly recommend this series especially if you like intense dark n suspenseful drama. -
Jenniferdenes15 September 2019Great turns and twists of a "who done it" story line. Ultimately, those who are implicated are not held accountable.
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A young and recently married couple Adam and Gracie are murdered in cold blood by one Lee Walsh, a small time mugger. Lee then commits a car theft at knife point and drives off to the Scottish countryside to finish what he had started. As fate would have it, his car meets with an accident and overturns, gravely injuring him. But strangely, he has landed up in the farm of the Elliott and the Douglas families, Adam and Gracie's folks, respectively. It sounds too much of a coincidence, and therefore, it perhaps isn't.
Almost unconscious, Lee is rescued by the two families in mourning already due to the tragic loss of the lives of their loved ones, it takes them no time to discover who Lee Walsh actually is. They hold back their retribution, albeit only temporarily, giving sanity a chance. In the dead of the night though, someone's unrestrained anguish and hatred for the murderer get the better of the senses, and Lee's death is inevitable. Each one of the members is aware that the culprit is one among them, but no one owns up. In the meanwhile, police detectives arrive at their doorstep to speak to them about the double murder and Lee Walsh. It's showtime - do they discover about Lee's death at the barn too, and is retribution the real motive?
"One of Us" is a gripping BBC mini series based on an apparent coincidence that really isn't one. It's a complex web of mysterious liaisons and relationships, family secrets and emotional turbulence. Created & written by Harry & Jack Williams and directed by William McGregor, the series is brutally fast, deeply disturbing and sharply narrated. The performances are commendable, and the Scottish countryside is beautiful. There is a subplot playing by the side about the dilemma of the investigating officer, and it was altogether avoidable as it's not relevant to the theme. -
jrarichards3 November 2019A Harry and Jack Williams work that was made after "The Missing" (which it cannot quite match), though preceeding "Baptiste".
Many of the Brothers' typical features are here, including a somewhat mysterious and darkish setting (a remote bit of the Scottish Highlands, though Edinburgh is in there too), and a complex, all-set-to-fail setup between people (in this case mainly two neighbouring families living in that remote location whose kids end up getting married, for better or for worse, as it were).
It is actually the murder of this "happy couple" that sets the whole thing off, followed by the family's opportunity for revenge against the murderer; and there is an element of "detectives solving the crime". However, the policework is deliberately rather sketched out, as this story is far more about decent-ish people keeping guilty secrets from one another, and how that builds a rickety edifice capable of bringing everything and everybody down at any moment.
It's also about the world of Edinburgh drug crime, and about how readily that can be co-opted into other ugly activities.
There are no winners here, and maybe that's just how the viewer likes it. But it's a grim, tough watch, with little or nothing to alleviate things, and anybody with even the slightest secret (and, let's face it, that could be most of us) will probably end up getting some kind of disturbing vicarious guilt out of this...
What may assuage that a bit is an element of predictability, as well as (momentary) tendencies within the audience to just collapse in laughter at everything, so melodramatic does the story at times become. It's a fine line between serial seriousness and pastiche, and "One of Us" may cross that line at times. Certainly it comes pretty close.
So why partake?
Well, a few should not, and maybe many might not want to bother. But - despite a wider range of accents than probably have a right to be present, given the setting - there is good acting in there, from Juliet Stevenson, Joanna Vanderham and John Lynch especially. Adrian Edmondson is present - playing it straight - but not achieving much; while Julie Graham plays basically the same role as she always does (though that can be OK). Joe Dempsie and Laura Fraser are further familiar (good-looking) faces, while Steve Evets as Lancashire's own DS Barker looks like he's been parachuted in from another reality ... until such time as a key final scene leaves us aware that he's been dramatically underused for some unknown reason.
Ultimately, it's interesting that a "what would you do if you came across your kid's/kids' murderer?" question could have been played straight, as just that - and this is what we did indeed feel we might be getting with "One of Us". And that might actually have been a braver and more stunning presentation than the one we got, in which the protagonists are so mired in many kinds of guilt and (mostly) so closely connected with the events that led up to the murders, that we are left with a far more basic conclusion that "messed-up people do messed-up things", often in a manner that spirals entirely out of control.
Yet this is a morality tale that lacks the courage to lionise morality. It allows a corrupt individual whose actions even caused death to get away with that, while making it clear that the most Godly person here has done terrible things because of his inability to tolerate "ungodliness". As if that was not enough, almost everyone present has broken promises to people they care about.
This is not exactly rocket science as a discovery about life, but where does the watcher of these 4 episodes go next - having come through them? -
drey-6222816 September 2016In recent years we've seen a few 'whydunit' dramas emerge, such as The Fall, when we know who the perpetrator is from the outset and spend the series trying to figure out what drives them to kill. One of Us, which began last week on BBC One, however reverts to the traditional 'whodunit' style - with not just one homicide, but three.
The series is very much reminiscent of "Nordic Noir" - the setting brings to mind Scandinavian crime dramas where it rains a lot, it is bleak and dark and there are lots of shots of cars driving down winding country roads. We have a rural and urban contrast in this series that is often seen in Scandi crime drama - the bustling city streets of Edinburgh and the isolated and remote countryside of the Highlands. I think this will be a consistent theme throughout the series and will be crucial to the plot.
One of Us is very much within the 'post forensics' genre (Jermyn, 2013). Audiences are looking for more than the bodies, morgues and forensic science that typifies series like CSI. They want to immerse themselves in the complex narratives and multifaceted characters that surround a homicide, they want access to the stories, not just the physical evidence - something that One of Us looks like it will deliver on. Audiences are now quite sophisticated in their understandings of homicide. Exposed to a vast market of crime fiction, true crime, crime drama and crime film - not to mention the proliferation of online spaces dedicated to all things homicide - they are often quite accurate in their beliefs about what this crime is, how and why it happens. But One of Us presents a challenge for even the most dedicated crime fan.
The first episode was a veritable feast of crime and deviance - alcoholism, drug dealing, car-jacking, burglary, homicide, police officers engaging in misconduct.
There is significant doubt in the audiences' minds as to whether the man the family think killed Adam and Gracie actually did kill them. The scenario they think played out is actually quite rare. Brookman (2005) found that only 7% of homicides occurred in the course of another crime (like burglary, robbery or sex attacks). Most people who are the victims of homicide are killed by people they know - most often a partner, ex-partner, family member or acquaintance. Therefore when speculating about the 'whodunit' question, the answers probably lie within the family we were introduced to in last night's episode.
There were some thought-provoking moments. For example in recalling that she had shot a bird earlier that day, Louise says "What kind of person gets pleasure out of death?". Euthanasia appeared as a topic when care home resident Meredith asked her nurse Claire to help her die. Detective Inspector Wallace appears to be stealing LSD from the police evidence store and selling it to a drug dealer - apparently to raise money for her daughter's life saving operation. Therefore this series is asking some bigger questions about homicide - when is it right or justified to take another persons' life? How far will people go to save a life?
After the first episode, we were left with the pieces of a challenging jigsaw scattered all over the floor - with not much idea how they fitted together and whether they were all part of the same puzzle. The writers provided us with a few theories that left seasoned crime drama viewers saying "That's far too obvious", so we are certainly in for an interesting ride as the series unfolds. -
lcherresse25 April 2020Very good mystery. Kept me interested and kept the suspense. I love how unpredictable it is.
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wjpiv13 September 2016It is tempting to suggest that there is a lot of overacting as one character after another steps of to bat and takes his or her best swing at devouring the entire set by chewing up mammoth mouthfuls of scenery. However, it's really an issue created by the writers who seem to have never grown out of that kind of dark teenage angst normally reserved for stories about the dating lives of vampires and werewolves. Almost every single person, whether it be a main character or a minor one, has some deep dark secret struggle. And this allows each one to give some sort of speech filled with clichés and platitudes about how hard life is and expound on whatever existential crisis he or she is faced with. Not one person is "normal" or even remotely likable, but, of course, the solution to the crime is supposed to be so shocking that the writing team probably thought that the audience would at least think the worst of the worst was the guilty party. Unfortunately, the plot device used was so ridiculous that if I had perhaps begun to believe this hot mess would resolve itself in a redeeming manner, I was sorely disappointed. Moreover, they sure dragged things out tying up all the frayed ends that they had created complete with more pontificating about the trials and tribulations of existence. So, if you want melodrama boarding on high camp - lines so predictable you find yourself mouthing them along with the actors - and a story that is as tangled and twisted as it is overworked and overwrought - by all means check this miniseries out.
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ikanboy12 May 2018The who in whodunit stays well hidden until near the end, but not before practically everybody else is trotted out as a possibility. The plot, as usual, revolves around everyone doing the wrong thing, including the Detective, played by a favorite of mine, Laura Fraser, whose deer in the headlight looks are a delight. Unfortunately after all the shenanigans the denouement seems over blown, and the tied up plot ends too pat.