Annabel Scholey and Colin Morgan are watchable leads in the somewhat patchy Dead and Buried
“You need to shut that down now or it will fuck you up”
The premise of Dead and Buried is certainly a strong one. What would you do if you came across the man convicted for killing your brother 20 years ago in a supermarket car park? What chain reaction of emotions would it trigger? What course of action might it provoke you to take? For Cathy, a Northern Irish teacher, it is an extreme response in both cases, setting in motion a tragic set of events that threatens to swallow up all concerned.
At first it is a light stalking on Facebook to see where Michael’s life is now at but it soon snowballs into more, ordering pizzas and sending funeral directors to his new family’s home. And as Cathy starts to catfish him with a fake identity, it is clear she has much more on her mind despite the warnings from bestie Sally and ever-patient husband Raymie, deploying a campaign of psychological torment on the man who so very wronged her.
Screenwriter Colin Bateman has adapted his own play Bag for Life here but whilst he starts off with the moody intensity to draw you in, he struggles to provide enough dramatic heft to maintain much real interest. Flickering flashbacks give us a sense of the lives affected in the past but never really give us enough of an empathetic grounding for Cathy’s increasingly chaotic course of action, the increasing orbit of which sucks in more and more of those around her.
That she’s self-obsessed and barely notices this is par the course and Annabel Scholey sells this so well, the dark depths of Cathy’s traumatised psyche almost painful to behold. But we’re left with too little to engage with, to really make us understand why she’s doing all this and more crucially, why we should care. Colin Morgan is fine as Michael, working through his own past demons – when his wife’s creepy, wealthy, religious father will let him that is – but what starts off intriguing ends up rather unsatisfying. Best left in the garden shed.
