Nice priest Merrily Watkins (breathless Anna Maxwell Martin) has a new job, in rural Herefordshire. Midwinter of the Spirit (ITV), based on the book by Phil Rickman, is no Vicar of Dibley, though. Or, if it is, it’s VoD meets The Exorcist. Meets CSI.
She – the Rev Merrily – is one, an exorcist, as well as doing christenings, village fetes, more tea etc. Deliverance, they call it – trying to protect people from intrusion into their lives by entities from another world. Merrily’s teenage daughter Jane calls it “ghostbusting for Jesus”.
“There are dangers in this kind of work, Merrily,” warns Huw (David Threlfall), the sexist deliverance tutor. “Not just dangers in the mind and the soul, but dangers in the dregs of humanity who attach themselves to the flipside of what we believe in, little rat eyes in the dark waiting to infect you.”
He’s not wrong, either. Very soon, a bearded dead man turns up in the woods, nailed to a tree, arms outstretched, wearing a crown of barbed wire (nice modern twist, that). There are animal skulls about the place, a sure sign that there’s something fishy going on. It turns out that the dead man was some kind of satanist, judging by what turns up in his cellar. The police appeal to Merrily, and her knowledge of both the Bible and the supernatural, for help.
Merrily’s predecessor, Canon Dobbs, is still around but he seems to have lost his mind, gibbering away about God knows what. He knows something though, I reckon, if only he’d tell Merrily … oops, too late. He’s not telling anyone anything any more, unless he comes back, if you know what I’m saying.
In hospital, the sarcastically named Denzil Joy, an evil abuser and predator on the vulnerable, gasps his final breaths in the middle of the night. And dies. Then sits up in bed, grabs the hand of Merrily, who is there to give him his last rites, sinking his nails into her palm. Ouch, it looks nasty. Is that what Huw meant by infection? Now she has got stigmata, too. Plus, she’s seeing all these scary things that may or may not be there – body bags, scary-looking chaps sitting in her bed. No wonder she is so stressed – Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily, life is a bloody nightmare. And then there’s Jane’s new gothic friend, Rowenna, who is good news in some ways, but there’s also something a little creepy about her. She lives alone in a lonely cottage and has an unhealthy interest in dead ravens, that kind of thing.
This is not a slow build, one that creeps up on you and takes you unawares. It dives straight in with a woodland crucifixion and then it’s pretty much full-on supernatural horror turned up to 11 from there. And just in case you’re not getting the message, the colour’s been turned right down so that there is a ghostly pallor to it; there’s an eerie score that crescendoes and becomes increasingly discordant in the run-up to the shocks; and there’s the sound of the whistling wind, even on what looks like a perfectly still day. Subtle Midwinter of the Spirit is not, and it loses some genuine scariness because of it. But it’s still a lot of fun, just the thing to both cheer and chill as the nights close in.
I don’t often take much notice of the credits, but a name catches my eye as it scrolls past in a northerly direction. Script supervisor: Anita Christy. An anagram of Antichrist ya? Coincidence? I don’t think so …
Also fun, but even sillier, is World of Weird (Channel 4), in which reporters and comedians scour the planet in search of OMGs. Kind of Louis Theroux but without any proper exploration or insight. Louis lite, then.
Heavily armed US doomsday preppers, building fortresses and bunkers in readiness for the Apocalypse? Pah, old news, seen it all before – on Louis Theroux for one. But I like BronyCon in Baltimore, a convention for grown adult male enthusiasts of My Little Pony. And the Japanese agency that hires out fake friends and family members for people whose real ones don’t measure up (if anyone starts one up over here, let me know). And the Texas couple who share their house with a two-tonne buffalo. Do you though, RC and Sherron, do you really? Does Wild Thing the wild plains buffalo actually have the run of your house when the cameras aren’t there (it does look very tidy). Or are you just looking for a bit of attention?
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion