Binge-r #269: Landscapers + Yellowjackets
Natural Born Killers: Olivia Colman (Susan) and David Thewlis (Christopher) in Landscapers
LANDSCAPERS
Streaming Service: Stan
Availability: All four episodes now streaming
The reign of Olivia Colman continues with this idiosyncratic true crime drama which draws dramatic resonance from her comic ability to snap between psychological states, as if her character has already been fractured into pieces we can’t quite yet see. You get the real life outline at the start of this four episode limited series: in 2014 ageing British couple Susan and Christopher Edwards were convicted of murdering her parents in 1998 and sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in jail. The pair maintain their innocence, even faced with what Susan (Colman) admits to their legal aid solicitor is, “a bit of a pickle”, since the bodies were found buried in a backyard garden with bullet wounds. Broadly speaking, what would normally be a mystery is here treated as the merely incongruous, while the merely incongruous is treated as a mystery.
Landscapers was written by Colman’s husband, Ed Sinclair, and while it’s hard to conceive of it being necessary after The Favourite, The Father, and The Crown, it is an exemplary dramatic showcase for the actor. With David Thewlis as Christopher, whose dedication to his wife comes with the actor’s prickly persistence, Susan moves between cheery optimism, delusions fuelled by old Hollywood movies, and moments of shattering conviction. In his initial e-mails with police – this is definitely not your normal procedural – Christopher emphasises how “fragile” Susan is, how he must protect her, but the narrative lets you sense the inverse of that, that Susan controls Christopher and that part of the double murder coming to light is that he can no longer carry on with their status quo.
Landscapers was directed by Will Sharpe, who had Colman as his star in his 2016 series Flowers [full review here], a wildly original black comedy I have spent the last few years telling everyone to watch. His sensibility matches the material – the police officers are in a parallel universe, with Flowers alumni Daniel Rigby doing a hilarious take on the eternally gruff “guvnor” the investigating detectives answer to. There are moments of clockwork curiosity and shape-shifting scenes; one wintry fantasia appears to be occurring inside a snow globe. The question is whether there’s a through line that makes something of this quirkiness, which brings the show back to Colman, who steadily reveals more of Susan from the second episode onwards. The tragic is always lurking here, insinuating itself into these supposedly gentle lives, and that ultimately informs this offbeat series more than the Gerard Depardieu storyline. Colman’s rule continues unabated.
Live Through This: Christina Ricci (Misty) in Yellowjackets
YELLOWJACKETS S1 (Paramount+, all 10 episodes now streaming): With the weekly episode count at a binge-worthy four, let me say that this now and then drama is the first must-see show I’ve found on Paramount+. When the plane carrying a New Jersey high school soccer team crashes in the Canadian wilderness in 1995 they’re stranded long enough – as you soon learn – for very bad impulses to take root amongst these teenage girls. A quarter century later and the survivors refuse to discuss what happened, even as circumstances force them to interact. There are all kinds of horrors wound through this knife-edge drama, from elemental film terrors to adolescent group dynamics to the negation of middle-aged suburban routines. Each intersects with the character development with a tension and suggestion that is sublime, so that you can’t help but draw connections between the two layers of matching performances. The Lord of the Flies is the obvious comparison, but here survival is a much trickier proposition, as indicated by the work of Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci and a never better Melanie Lynskey as women who’ve never quite returned from whatever they discovered. And a serious Gen X bonus: the period soundtrack is loaded.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah (2021, 125 minutes) is a wrenching depiction of historic Black activism and institutional power with compelling performances from Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield; the conceit of appearing to be a single take gives Sam Mendes’ World War One thriller 1917 (2019, 118 minutes) an in the moment momentum bolstered by an all-star British acting ensemble.
New on SBS on Demand: Filmmaker Richard Kelly never came close to matching it, but Donnie Darko (2001, 109 minutes) remains a remarkable spin on the teen coming of age drama, with a young Jake Gyllenhaal as the high school student caught up in time loops, apocalyptic visions, and a dance troupe named Sparkle Motion.
New on Stan: Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995, 101 minutes) and Before Sunset (2004, 81 minutes) are the first two parts of one of the cinema’s great trilogies, with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke as university students who spend the night together in Vienna and then reunite in Paris years later, examining their lives and connection through piercing dialogue and screen alchemy.
>> Missed the last BINGE-R? Click here to catch up on Stan’s 1940s atom bomb period drama Manhattan and Jane Campion’s Netflix movie The Power of the Dog.
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