Tuppence Middleton and Martin Compston lead slightly anemic ITV thriller Our House
“There’s nothing you or I can do to get it back”
What would you do if one day, you arrived home to find that your stuff had all gone, a family of strangers were moving into your house and you couldn’t get hold of your husband. Such is the premise of ITV thriller Our House, written by Simon Ashdown from Louise Candlish’s novel and effectively if not outstandingly directed by Sheree Folkson.
The other question the show asks is is there any downside to getting down and dirty with Rupert Penry-Jones (in character or not…) to which the answer is unequivocably ‘no’, although [mild spoiler] Tuppence Middleton’s Fi might ultimately disagree after her understandable decision plays a part in the highly tangled things that come to pass.
The four-parter does a decent job of unravelling its narrative in an engaging way. As we follow Fi’s mildly terrified confusion in the present day, flashbacks take us to the recent past and the familial situation she shared with Martin Compston’s Bram and their two kids, quickly coming to realise that it wasn’t a bed of roses and trouble has been brewing for a while.
It’s all a bit improbable in the best kind of pulpy way – meet-cutes in lifts, scary car chases at night, flirty neighbours and separated couples coming up with ridiculous living arrangements. Middleton is perhaps a little too glacially cool to really engage as the lead here, Compston is more fun as doofus Bram and Penry-Jones is huge amounts of fun (and smoking hot) as mysterious Mike.
