It’s a radical thought I know, but I sometimes wonder what it would be like if a new TV thriller began by carefully introducing the characters and basic situation, before proceeding chronologically from there. In the meantime, though, there’s BBC1’s The Cry, which didn’t just start with the traditional blizzard of time-shifts, but continued like that for the next hour.
In one of the more prolonged of Sunday’s many opening scenes — it lasted at least 60 seconds — main character Joanna (Jenna Coleman) explained to an unseen listener that ‘that’s when this began, with two faces’. When the scene was replayed 55 minutes later, we discovered that she was talking to a psychiatrist, but still had no idea what the ‘two faces’ were — and couldn’t even be entirely sure what the ‘this’ referred to. From the occasional moments of courtroom drama and the intermittent sightings of a mob demonstrating against her, we do know that Joanna’s on trial for something that’s presumably connected to the disappearance of her baby towards the end of the episode. But exactly what she’s supposed to have done — along with when, how and why — remains impeccably unclear.
Of course, it’s not unknown for TV dramas to jump about like this in a cunning bid to disguise the fact that what we’re watching is a completely bog-standard thriller. Here, however, the constant changes of perspective are not only intriguing in themselves; they also back up the programme’s central theme of how readily we simplify people in the news for the purposes of easy judgment by reminding us how annoyingly harder that judgment becomes once we know more about their lives.
At this stage, in fact, the one consistently readable character is baby Noah, who’s stuck to crying a lot, thereby shredding Joanna’s nerves and making her feel like a rubbish mother.
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