Requiem, episode one: it's about time we had a decent TV horror story

It’s been a while since British television’s last properly convincing, genuinely creepy horror story. The MR James adaptations were sporadic and patchy, The Secret of Crickley Hall was sheer hokum and Penny Dreadful never quite fulfilled its promise. American small-screen horror, meanwhile, is stuck in a cul de sac of self-referential camp courtesy of American Horror Story and Scream Queens, or trailing, blank-eyed, in the wake of The Walking Dead. 

Requiem, written by Australian Kris Mrksa (gangster soap Underbelly, the adaptation of The Slap) and directed by Mahalia Belo (Ellen) may not have offered anything radically new but certainly made for an intoxicating remix of familiar ingredients.

The set-up

Our protagonist, Matilda Gray (Lydia Wilson), is a cellist of increasing renown, poised to take up a year-long residency in New York with accompanist and loyal ally Hal (Joel Fry), when her mother Janice (Joanna Scanlan) slits her throat in front of her, apparently driven mad by whispering voices that interrupted a recording of Matilda performing.

Desperate for answers, or even just someone or something tangible to blame, and unconvinced by the police pragmatically/realistically blaming a regime of antidepressants, Matilda stumbles upon a stash of photos, newspaper clippings, a video and half a friendship brooch – left, Matilda suspects, intentionally – pertaining to Carys Howell, a child who went missing from the Welsh village of Penllynith in 1994. Matilda drags Hal to Penllynith during the funeral of wealthy landowner Ewan Dean, who himself committed suicide the day after Janice, apparently driven mad by… something or other, up in his mouldering country pile. 

Matilda made an appealing, enigmatic protagonist

Blonde girl in peril has been a movie cliché since the dawn of cinema, yet Matilda is no screaming victim – she’s smart, determined and trying to face down her grief and trauma yet stirring exactly those emotions up in the people of Penllynith when she starts asking questions about young Carys. She’s also a bit odd, apparently susceptible to nightmares, hearing or even feeling voices, and powerful sense of deja vu. Lydia Wilson made an enticingly ambiguous lead, all the better for being a relative unknown on television. Just as Matilda couldn’t always believe her eyes, nor should we.

The troubled relationships of parents and children

As well as an exploration of grief, Requiem seems likely to delve deeply into the difficulties of parent-child relationships. While Tilly and her mother seemed close and warm, each had a secret (Tilly was a smoker, her mother was on antidepressants).

There was, perhaps, a slight desperation to Janice’s affection, although understandable if her own parents died young. Carys’s mother Rose (now Morgan, married to Aron and played by Claire Rushbrook) was clearly still plagued by despair over her daughter’s disappearance. She also had beef with Ewan, to judge by her ripping up the funeral invitation. Did she suspect him of involvement in Carys’s disappearance? What became of Sean Howell, Carys’s father – or indeed Tilly’s dad – remains a mystery for now. In the meantime, expect Ewan’s sister and estate trustee Meredith (“the wheelchair lady,” as Nick put it charmingly) to feature prominently later on.

Don’t trust the blokes

Joel Fry, more commonly seen in comedies (notably Plebs and W1A), was intriguingly cast. His Hal is almost certainly too kind and protective to be entirely trustworthy as he cast jealous eyes at Aussie hunk Nick (James Frecheville, from Mrksa’s Underbelly), Ewan Dean’s nephew poised, much to his astonishment, to inherit the country pile. While it was no surprise to find Hal to be a supernatural sceptic, I suspect Nick’s tentative interest may simply reflect a romantic interest in Matilda. Groundsman Ed also knows a little more than he lets on, speculating that Ewan’s father might still be haunting the woods before backtracking to claim that “Whatever’s in those woods has been there a lot longer than Mr Dean.” Not very reassuring. 

Horror movie tropes were everywhere – but only added to the atmosphere

Haunted houses, things in the woods, whispering voices, banging doors, gloomy cellars, recurring nightmares, missing children, flickering lights, rattling doorknobs, elusive reflections… Mrksa and Belo weren’t shy of embracing the familiar gimmicks of horror movies. Yet it was the framing of them, the setting and careful pacing that stopped Requiem from feeling tired, conjuring a sense of world strong enough to hold it all together. 

Influences were placed front and centre

Likewise, writer and director brandished their influences proudly, drawing on perhaps the high watermark of intellectually engaging chillers, the late Sixties to early Eighties: the hostile rural pub of An American Werewolf in London, the fleeting visions of a lost child of Don’t Look Now, the suicide from atop a stately home of The Omen, the hints of pagan misdeeds recalling The Wicker Man. Expect more of this as the series progresses.

The eeriness is rural and urban

Requiem was particularly impressive for conjuring menace and chills amid both the brutalist modernism of London’s South Bank (nice on-brand posters for Matilda’s concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall) and the drizzly hills of rural Wales, the latter offering the traditional mistrust of strangers, certainly, but also a sense of moral and literal decay beneath the bucolic surface. Perhaps it was the outsider’s eye of Aussie native Mrksa that helped find the weirdness in the apparently everyday, while the soundtrack, featuring contributions from Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan, was deployed sparingly but effectively. 

The twist was enticing, if no great surprise

We ended with Matilda, driven by visions from her nightmares, discovering the trapdoor which apparently caused Ewan to lose his mind and then and entire bunker of bric-a-brac, papers and recordings of spectral voices, much of it dating back to March 1994, when Carys disappeared. And then the bombshell: Matilda Gray thinks she is, or was, Carys Howell. This didn’t, perhaps, come as a huge surprise, although it beg the question: of why Matilda didn’t recognize the photo of Carys/herself as a child? But this fitted a show equally content to unsettle as shock, and set up the rest of the series beautifully.