Skip to main content

Marcella review – Anna Friel thriller doesn't shock like it used to

ITV’s troubled, amnesiac detective is back – deep undercover in Belfast – but the credulity-stretching twists are just too much this time around

If ever there is a “previously on …” to look forward to, it would be Marcella’s (ITV), if only to see how much they could pack into a single recap. The third season of the largely ludicrous crime noir begins with Marcella, a former-ish detective (Anna Friel, often in the bath), deep undercover in Belfast. She has assumed a new life as Keira Devlin, which she is able to do, you may recall, because she is supposed to be dead, having cut her own mouth open with scissors at the end of the last season in one of her violent fugue states, after learning that she was responsible for the death of her baby daughter. That is the short version of events, anyway.

In Belfast, Marcella/Keira is struggling to tell the difference between the two. She is attempting to embed, with the emphasis on bed, herself within the Maguire family, who live a kind of Downton-meets-Top Boy lifestyle, running the organised crime scene in the city and beyond. The fugue states seem to have disappeared without a mention, though maybe they are saving them up for one big blackout. Keira is shacked up in a nice house, with a nice car and a nice boyfriend, Lawrence, who does the accounts for the Maguires, while sneakily helping himself to a slice of the profits.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3t27yF0
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more