The Listeners review – Rebecca Hall’s hauntingly delicate drama will paralyse you with dread | Television & radio

The query of what you’d do if nobody believed you is without doubt one of the most haunting there’s. Imagine you about what? Doesn’t matter. What occurs should you really feel a factor, know a factor or are having a factor occur to you, and also you inform folks – and nobody takes you critically?

That’s the terrifying query on the coronary heart of the four-part drama The Listeners, tailored by Jordan Tannahill from his e book of the identical identify. The motion is moved from the US to the UK, and Rebecca Corridor (with a brief haircut to permit for the ear-acting concerned – you’ll see) performs Claire, a busy spouse, mom, good friend and a charismatic instructor of literature to youngsters on the native faculty. Then she, and he or she (apparently) alone, begins listening to a low, torturous, rumbling hum – from someplace outdoors herself. She proves this by placing her fingers in her ears, whereupon it disappears. Her husband, Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah), suggests tinnitus and docs can discover no bodily trigger.

Noise-cancelling headphones can solely take you to date. Quickly Claire is unable to sleep (Paul strikes with no good grace into the spare room); exhausted, she snaps at her college students. She spends her nights trying to find potential explanations on the web. By the point one in all her college students, Kyle (newcomer Ollie West, doing nicely to determine himself as a presence subsequent to one in all Corridor’s most intriguing performances), reveals that he hears the identical factor, the scenario is rife with vulnerabilities and ripe for exploitation. Kyle’s personal mom “freaked out” when he instructed her, so now he’s pretending it’s gone.

The pair examine wind turbine websites and different potential exterior sources of the hum, earlier than falling in with a help group of others who hear it and who, led by an enthralling husband-and-wife crew, are studying to dwell with the sound. Possibly hearken to it, as if it’s attempting to inform us one thing. Possibly even study to like it. Then every thing can be fantastic.

From there, The Listeners delves deeply and unpicks delicately the wants, the motivations and the personalities of those that discover what they might not even know they’re trying to find in conspiracy theories, various therapies, religion methods and cults. It appears to be like onerous at human frailties and foibles, as Claire is suspended for assembly a pupil outdoors faculty hours – and particularly at how a lot we have to be seen, heard and understood by others, how briskly we collapse if that want is just not fulfilled by our normal sources, and the way shortly and desperately we go searching for fulfilment elsewhere.

As Claire and Kyle change into extra enmeshed within the group, bigger points about residing in a post-truth world emerge. How do you apportion weight or worth to the purported details dashing at us 24/7 from extra angles and at larger velocity than any human being was designed to resist? How do you cease them subverting even a thoughts similar to Claire’s, which prides itself on its rationality and intelligence?

Tannahill’s script and particularly Janicza Bravo’s path fastidiously layer overlapping uncertainties as they transfer by means of Claire’s story. The programme retains you finely unbalanced all through, as concepts concerning the boundary between supernatural and plausibly scientific explanations are launched, unreliable narrators begin – perhaps! – getting into into proceedings, and our capability for collective delusion and denial – the power of it, the safety it affords and the destruction wreaked by it ultimately – are all dissected and laid out for horrified inspection. By the ultimate episode, it has constructed a way of thriller-ish and existential dread that’s fairly paralysing.

The one besetting flaw within the story is that there’s a lot loving consideration lavished on Claire and her unravelling that the opposite characters can really feel underdeveloped. Claire’s husband, for instance, appears too instantly impatient together with her downside, even when it appears more likely to be merely bodily, and easily livid – relatively than maybe additionally baffled, curious, frightened or saddened by her growing reliance on the group. And her nice good friend Cass (Franc Ashman) has a equally simplistic response; she drops Claire solely as quickly as information of her suspension reaches her. “Why would I need to ask a rapist something?” she snarls, when Claire meets her in a restaurant to attempt to construct bridges. It’s a loud bum observe in a considerate, thought-provoking drama in any other case filled with nuance and put along with surpassing care and delicacy.