Angela Black is excellent at capturing the disconcertingly surreal quality of life for a woman under coercive control.Courtesy of CBC Gem
Listen, if your taste runs to dark, slow-burning British thrillers, there’s a good one to recommend. But be aware it has a serious theme, specifically domestic abuse and coercive control.
Also be aware that when it aired in Britain last year it had a huge audience that became deeply divided. There’s a shift in the third episode (there are six) and while some viewers threw up their hands, others praised the series for capturing the strain on mental health and the gaslighting that comes with domestic abuse.
Angela Black (streams CBC Gem) presents Angela (Joanne Froggatt from Downton Abbey) as a married mother of two living in a spartan but luxury home, and we see her with her husband, Olivier (Michiel Huisman), entertaining guests. In the casual chatter Angela says something innocuous but you can feel a sudden tension descend. As soon as the guests leave, Olivier turns quietly menacing. “You embarrassed me,” he says. Angela knows that means a beating. (The violence happens off-screen, you can’t say it’s exploitive.) The next day she’s dazed and bruised.
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She makes excuses to explain her bruises at the animal shelter where she volunteers. She stares at one of the muzzled dogs with a mixture of wariness and hope. Not long after, a stranger approaches her, asking to borrow a cigarette lighter. He notices the bruises. Then the guy, Ed (Samuel Adewunmi), seems to be following her. Is she imagining it? Nope. Ed has a warning. Angela’s husband has hired him to dig up dirt on her, eyeing a divorce and custody of the children.
There begins a cat-and-mouse game with Olivier. What’s he up to? It might be more sinister than Angela believes. Ed says it is. A murder is being planned. But in Angela’s fragile state, it’s unclear what’s terrifying and what’s merely troubling.
The series is excellent at capturing the disconcertingly surreal quality of life for a woman under coercive control. What might strike some viewers as an implausible turn of events is made plausible by Froggatt’s superb performance of drained intensity. “You think you’ll fight back or scream, don’t you?” she says to Ed about her situation. “Not just stand here.”
Angela Black (the producers collaborated with the charity Women’s Aid to ensure authenticity) is part of a batch of dramas in the past few years from Britain that are marked by an unsettling paranoia about violent evil lurking under posh lives, and strangers turning up to issue warnings about what’s been hidden in the past. There is some meaning to be extrapolated from these continuing excavations of comfortable lives, but it’s too early to say what truly emerges.
Joanne Froggatt plays Angela, a married mother of two living in a spartan but luxury home with her husband, Olivier, played by Michiel Huisman.des willie/Courtesy of CBC Gem
One thing Angela Black shares with other recent series though is the pared-down drama. There are few characters, the focus is on the central figures, and suggestions of corruption and malice are unsubtle – here, the threatening dogs and a dead fox on the roadside.
Perhaps the best fiction about domestic abuse was Roddy Doyle’s novel, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. Unsentimental and plain, it allows Paula Spencer, the victim, to tell her own story with an unnerving honesty: “He loved me and he beat me. I loved him and I took it. It’s as simple as that, and as stupid and complicated.” Her survival isn’t presented as a triumph, but as a fact of life that arrives when lies are left behind.
This series adds a thriller storyline that’s gripping, then discombobulating, and might, in the end, be found a tad unsatisfying. But that’s because its focus is really on Angela’s harrowing experience, and the frailty of her mind. It takes you to a dark place, you’re intrigued and appalled.
Now in case you might find Angela Black too dark, good as it is, this column offers you an alternative. Hang Ups (also CBC Gem, six episodes) is a loose, daft British adaptation of Lisa Kudrow’s Showtime series Web Therapy. Here it stars Stephen Mangan as a broke, slightly desperate therapist who launches an online therapy business. From the vantage point of his chaotic home, with wife, kids, family and friends barging in, he does short online therapy sessions with clients. Much of it is improvised, and hilariously so. The short, sweet and kooky therapy sessions mean Mangan attracted an array of fine actors to let loose, including Celia Imrie, Richard E. Grant, David Tennant and Charles Dance. This one’s a barrel of fun.
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