Sarah Parish, Anita Dobson and Mandip Gill deliver committed performances but Curfew’s central premise lacks an essential truth
“How can we get over toxic gender norms if we build our lives around them?”
With a screenplay by Lydia Yeoman, Jess Green and Sumerah Srivastav adapted from Jayne Cowie’s novel After Dark, Curfew is a new crime drama that has surfaced on Paramount+ in the UK with a fairly impressive cast (including my beloved Anita Dobson) delivering its unique concept. What if men were electronically tagged and restricted by curfew from going outside between 7pm and 7am in order to prioritise women’s safety?
It’s the type of conceit you need to take with a pinch of salt but if you don’t think too deeply about it, it’s an interesting thought experiment. And so when a woman is violently murdered in curfew time, major questions are asked about who could have done it since the system has all men locked down…or does it? With DI Pamela Green adamant it must have been a man, this six-part crime thriller winds a twisty way towards the truth.
Red herrings fly everywhere and a fractured timeline means it is often easy to get a bit discombobulated here but things to start to settle about midway through. Suspects are two-a-penny as are any number of hidden secrets – Mandip Gill’s Sarah chief among them – and troubled pasts haunt many as well – Sarah Parish’s brusque Pamela still grieving the murder of her daughter just before the curfew system was installed.
The minute you start to pull at any of those threads though and the construction of this alt-reality feels far too flimsy. There’s no acknowledgement of how the scale of domestic violence has been impacted by locking up men at home against their will and gay men are treated exactly the same with no exploration of this. A couple of early episodes feature a civics class at a college which allows for some discussion of this legislation, ahead of a major vote to make it permanent, but there could be so much more of this to make a convincing case for Curfew’s essential thesis.
