The best film of 2021 was one few people even heard of: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, directed by the Brit Will Sharpe. A fantastical biopic, it told the story of the English visual artist who popularized cats in the Victorian era through his surreal illustrations. Benedict Cumberbatch portrays the lead in his finest performance to date, and the sublime Claire Foy inhabits his wife, Emily. After tragedy strikes the couple, Wain’s fragile mental state leads to an increasingly psychedelic style and a nervous breakdown. Sharpe, all of 35, displays a dazzling visual palette, his own art matching that of his subject. After a brief, limited run in theaters, it was released on Amazon Prime with little fanfare. That’s a shame: The picture is a masterstroke.
With his limited series Landscapers, released on HBO last December, Sharpe outdoes himself. Technically, the series is true crime. But the actor-turned-director transforms the genre utterly. In fact, it’s one of the most imaginative television projects to date. The closest precedent would be The Singing Detective, Dennis Potter and Jon Amiel’s film noir musical of 1986. Sharpe and his co-creator, Ed Sinclair, tell the story of Susan and Christopher Edwards, the British couple convicted in 2014 of murdering her parents 15 years before. In bringing it to the screen, they eschew every police procedural convention you expect. In their place, they deploy a half-dozen different styles in a bold, seamless tapestry — from expressionism to surrealism and more. Sharpe even works in Brechtian style, one of the hardest to pull off on screen. Yet he does so with confidence, using projections, direct address, and metatheatrical stunts. The result is luminescent.
Over four episodes, Olivia Colman and David Thewlis star as the ill-fated couple in question. The plot points are almost absurdly minimal: Expats in France in the late ‘90s, the pair faces financial difficulty as Chris fails to secure employment. He places a call to his stepmother in desperation, asking for help, but in the course of the conversation divulges that Susan’s parents died under mysterious circumstances involving him and Susan. His stepmother relays the contents of the call to the police, who initiate an investigation. This begins as an email exchange with Chris, who convinces Susan that they should return to England and turn themselves in to the authorities. Since they have nothing to hide, he reasons, they can tell their story and be done with it. Instead, they find themselves tripped up during questioning by the police, who pit the couple’s conflicting stories against each other and pressure them into confessions of guilt.
And that’s it. No detective work, no “making of a murderer,” no real trial to speak of. Even the facts of the case don’t really interest Sharpe. Instead, he uses the story as a launchpad to explore the interior lives of the Edwardses — the shared fantasy they inhabit that sets them at odds with reality. The couple lives vicariously through film stars and cinema styles. When we first meet Susan, she buys a vintage movie poster of Gary Cooper. The Western plays a chief visual motif as she imagines Chris as the lawman in High Noon defending her from attack. Likewise, she and Chris maintain a fictitious correspondence with Gerard Depardieu that Sharpe brings to life in gauzy romantic cinematography. In actuality, Chris is meek and easily confused, and his naive trust in the police leads to his self-incrimination. As the couple’s plight worsens, Susan’s cinematic imaginings grow more and more elaborate, culminating in a Wild West shootout between the police, Chris, and herself, with pink smoke suffusing the air. Sharpe achieves one coup after another.
The director edits with breathtaking technique, often switching styles two or three times a scene. Chris and the police recite their email correspondence to the camera, and Sharpe moves in and out of surrealism and expressionism with verve. At one point, Detective Constable Emma Lancing (Kate O’Flynn) literally breaks the fourth wall: As Susan denies she murdered her parents, Lancing leads the audience out of the interrogation room, which literally disassembles before your eyes. Suddenly, you’re on a soundstage, with Susan’s parents (Felicity Montagu and David Hayman) on set to restage the killings in the eyes of the police. When Susan tells her version, she occupies some liminal place between the present and the past, simultaneously in conflict with her parents and narrating the event for the watching observers. We learn that she was abused by her father, her trauma erupting before our eyes, scrambling all sense of justice.
The police, led by Detective Chief Inspector Tony Collier (Daniel Rigby), come off initially as Keystone Cops, bumbling along as Collier explodes in hilarious tirades. Their antics add a black comic element to the proceedings, yet they persecute the poor couple with increasing zeal as the episodes progress. Lancing in particular makes it her mission to entrap the couple, and her steely-eyed grit, offset by uproarious double takes, sends up the entire force. From her work on The Crown and beyond, we’ve all seen Colman’s genius at work. Yet here she outshines even her best performances. Her emotional shifts are as subtle and florid as Sharpe’s editing. Thewlis, too, is brilliant, utterly relaxed in Chris’s docile skin. Along with his complete control of his craft, Sharpe makes sure he always serves the material. Somehow, despite the audacious display, nothing feels showy.
The show is so original that it’s difficult to say what it’s really about. It works on the level of emotion, color, and mood, like a Kandinsky. It draws on all of movie history, yet at the service of an idiosyncratic story. It’s a mystery that leaves more questions open than answered as if to say that those questions are the wrong ones in the first place. It’s as if the whole idea of linear thought and rational explanation is misplaced. It defies all expectations of what a genre picture should do.
As the Edwardses meet their fate, the film becomes increasingly symbolic, the minds of the characters fusing with their fantasy. Susan’s solicitor, Douglas (Dipo Ola), never provides much help but in the end thanks her for helping him find meaning in his life. Is this real? A projection of the mind? We never really know. The series becomes a chamber piece, a meditation on relationships, family trauma, and the price of love that heads in emotional terrain you can’t predict. One thing stands out: Moral acts live in a world of gray, and what looks clear to the outside eye may not be so.
Nick Coccoma is a Boston writer and critic who’s been published in New Politics, Critics at Large, and Full-Stop. Follow him on Substack at the Similitude and @NickCoccoma.
