Further director David Hayman fails to wind the suspense up the way a good thriller should. Each continuing revelation that convinces Helen Mirren that husband George Costigan is the killer and each subsequent piece of doubt should come like a dread shock – the film should ride this doubt and relief like a rollercoaster. But it doesn’t – the pacing of the scenes is muted. It does briefly pick up with a surprise accusation of someone else as the killer and a car chase at the end as though David Hayman realized at the last minute he needed to inject something. But the film seems too much caught up in the genre of the British tv arts programme – it was funded by two separate divisions of the BBC – to be effective. And as such it has had some acclaim among the arts audience who have no real experience with a hard and fast thriller, while it received no notice at all within the thriller/horror genre.

Helen Mirren is badly miscast as the wife. Mirren suggests too much of a well-bred upper middle-class woman and cannot seem to shake the association of an Oxbridge background – a role at which she usually performs very well. Unfortunately cast as an average lower middle-class Yorkshire woman from a working-class background she seems out of place – even more so when cast alongside George Costigan as her husband who looks well-over a decade younger than she. She looks completely out of place in the pub scenes. Far more credible in the part would have been Melanie Hill who plays her best friend and who suggests that same working-class background with both a shrewdness and vulnerability.