For the past three episodes, Helen FitzGerald’s The Cry has been adapted into a brilliant, taut, fascinating and emotional four-part thriller.
Ostensibly the story of a missing (kidnapped? murdered?) baby, it has developed beautifully and naturally into almost something else entirely: an exploration of manipulation, deception and paranoia so riveting it was hard to concentrate on the question that needed to be answered tonight. What did happen to baby Noah?
We’ve seen flashbacks to court hearings and witness cross-examining, and tonight we finally found out what Jo was on trial – not the murder of her baby (which I thought might be the case), but the murder of her husband. Again this flashing-back and now throwing in the phrase ‘murder of your husband’ obviously was a wow moment and, once again, created suspense: you knew what was going to happen, but didn’t know how or why.
Actually, scratch that: we knew exactly why. After the excellent third episode, where The Cry evolved plausibly, but maybe unexpectedly, into an exploration into the power dynamics of a married couple on the edge, Alistair and Jo became a hybrid of Petruchio and Katherine, Frank and Claire Underwood in House Of Cards, and Nick and Amy from Gone Girl. Their scheming and manipulation threatened to boil over in episode three; Jo was obviously distressed at the way Alistair seemed to be enjoying his plan of deception, and grief and guilt began to gnaw away at her insides. Any other relationship would have been over by now but they had a curious bond: he needed her to be the good wife to help see his plan through and manipulate the public while he was at it, and she needed him for some sort of strength and stability. They hated each other but loved each other and needed each other but didn’t need each other. The only thing keeping them together? They were inextricably linked by the secret they shared and the trauma they had experienced.
In this final episode, we joined the (un)happy couple a few months down the line: the police had more or less called off their search for Noah, which led Alistair to begin to plot a life for them together again. After an uncomfortable conversation with his mother (she knew that something was up and perhaps even knew what her son was capable of), he showed Jo a new apartment and suggested they stayed in Australia. Maybe they could have another baby. It’s just what they needed, he argued. He took a photo of her in the apartment, but the angle of the framing of the image seemed odd, like he was focusing on something else in frame and not Jo.
Jo insisted on going to see the place Alistair had buried Noah. He took some persuading, but he took to her the tree behind the beach. She lay on the ground, close to her baby again, and took back to Edinburgh with her a sprig of undergrowth in which the babe was buried. She had missed a physical object connected to Noah since Alistair had taken and destroyed his bib.
Things didn’t improve too much when they got back to Edinburgh. Alistair lost his job, but they should have a baby. It’s what they needed, he said insisted. Jo spent her days sat in Noah’s room, looking at videos of him and listening to his cry. The cry that drove her nearly insane in the pre-Australia was now a comfort. Alistair decided they should write a book about their experiences, and took a job with an organisation that helped couples who had lost children.
His was spinning lie until it became so big he could hide behind it.
Jo was disgusted. And she was beginning to escape from his controlling clutches. Alistair’s mum and daughter, Chloe, came to visit. Chloe was still obsessed about Noah, and finding him, and pricked Jo’s conscience.
She wanted out.
She told Alistair she didn’t want to be Chloe’s mother in case she failed again, and that she did not want to have another baby.
She wanted out.
But then something else. Something that drove Jo to do something drastic, something she felt she had to do to survive. She went through some of the letters people had sent in to her. One of them was from the old lady who helped her on the plane over to Australia.
That was the moment Jo knew Alistair had been bullshitting about the medicine. The moment she knew that by blaming her he had leverage over her, fertile ground in which to sow manipulation and self-doubt, and strike at the very core of any mother: whether she was a good mother or not. It was Alistair who had accidentally administered the wrong medicine to Noah, not Jo. Still a tragic accident, but one that had been exploited by Alistair for his own gain.
They suggested they went for a drive out in the country. Alistair didn’t come back. Now she knew the truth, she could not forgive him and, what’s more, could not let him live. She unhooked his seatbelt and took her hands off the wheel. The car careered off the side of the road.
Jo ended up going back to Australia and – what looked like – buying that apartment, so she could be close to her little boy again.
It was a lot to take in, a lot to unpack and process.
I did think that The Cry was a pretty fantastic and impressively plotted journey. To begin with, it was a study in how people judge others, then a missing persons or murder case, then an exploration of paranoia, deception and manipulation, and then it gave us a whopping, great moral dilemma at the end. Jo was, in essence, a murderer and yet we forgave her because it was a revenge attack against someone who chose to strike at the very heart of womanhood and motherhood. Love, protection, nurturing. She had been led to believe that she had failed in all of these things.
Add to all this emotional heft and depth some seriously brilliant editing, sound editing and acting. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen flashbacks and flash-forwards incorporated into the narrative so impressively or effectively; and the sound design was incredibly imaginative and actually aided the story. There’s no doubt that The Cry was very, very well made. But then there was the story and the characters. I dunno, this really got under my skin and made me think, and this was largely due to the characters – they felt real, and their stories felt real. It helped that there were career-best performances from Jenna Coleman and Ewan Leslie as the leads. They felt believable and plausible. I mean the thriller element you have to kind of go with (because it’s a fictional thriller, kids) but their actions and motivations felt really believable.
This seems to be rarer than you think in crime dramas, so much so that when it does happen you, in turn, believe.
Bravo to all involved.
Paul Hirons
@Son_Of_Ray
FOR OUR EPISODE ONE REVIEW CLICK HERE
FOR OUR EPISODE TWO REVIEW CLICK HERE
FOR OUR EPISODE THREE REVIEW CLICK HERE
FOR OUR PODCAST WITH HELEN FITZGERALD CLICK HERE
The Killing Times 