‘Broadchurch’ (Season 1)...A heart-wrenching mystery that explores grief, suffocation, secrets in a closely-knit sea-side town.
In an early episode of Boardchurch, little before tragedy strikes the Latimer family, we see Mark Latimer (an excellent Andrew Buchan), father of — the yet to be declared missing and later found dead— eleven-year-old Danny Latimer (Oskar McNamara), walking along the main town thoroughfare exchanging greetings and pleasantries with nearly everyone on the street. Soon after the incident, this intimacy and familiarity turn into suffocation. When Beth Latimer (Jodie Whittaker in a heart-breaking performance) goes to the supermarket, all eyes are on her. She tries to go back to work but is chased away with a protest of pities. The last place she can run away to is atop the looming cliffs, overlooking the vast ocean, and the sandy beach underneath, but that too isn’t for long, as all these spots are now the scene of the crime, and everyone she knows, is a suspect.
Though at its core, a whodunnit, spearheaded by the superb David Tennant (playing Detective Inspector Alec Hardy), and a peerless Olivia Coleman (playing Ellie Miller — I am going to use the phrase ‘Move away from me now, or I will piss in a cup and throw it at you’ in my daily conversations from now on), Broadchurch explicitly examines the immeasurable magnitude of anguish cast over the Latimer family due to this horrid act. The state of confusion, of not knowing what exactly to do next, how to be able to move on (if ever), is notably brought out through Jodie Whittaker’s performance. In one scene, she asks a reporter and later, another mother who has gone through a similar tragedy, how to process the grief, a manual-like set of instructions on learning to live with this hole in your heart, in your life forever, where being happy now feels being disrespectful, wrong. Like how her daughter, Chole (Charlotte Beaumont) in a later episode discloses how for a short while at least, she doesn’t want to be that dead kid’s sister.
Broadchurch is in no way perfect, (the small subplot with a psychic medium, felt out of place, and the one involving Nige Carter, played by Joe Sims, felt unnecessary) but nevertheless, devilishly gripping, as episodes oscillate from one suspect to the next, each examining their possible motive to murder an eleven-year-old child.
There are plot threads that go unexplained, which I assume would have been answered in the next two seasons (which I shall catch later, at leisure), but its brilliance is in portraying the emotional turmoil a murder investigation can bring on a victim’s family (not only the Latimer’s but many others as we learn about, through the show’s runtime) and because it is heart-wrenching to watch mothers bond over having murdered children.
