The Victim review – grab a drink and settle in for a gripping, vicious thriller

It would be understandable if you felt, at this particular juncture in your own and our collective national life, unable to welcome any further uncertainty. But, if you have passed through the looking glass – often with the help of a whisky glass – as I have, and your fractured psyche is now leaning into a life where nothing is as it seems and we walk on shifting sands scattered on the backs of turtles while political event horizons make the very air quake around us, welcome to BBC One’s new drama The Victim.

Playing out across four consecutive nights, it centres on a case of apparently mistaken identity. The first episode begins with the opening day of a criminal trial in Edinburgh high court, then alternates between the legal proceedings and scenes from events leading up to the case six months earlier.

Bus driver Craig Myers (James Harkness) is viciously attacked on his doorstep on Halloween, shortly after his name, picture and address are posted online by someone claiming that he is Eddie J Turner, the man who, aged 14, had killed a nine-year-old boy named Liam Graham and who was granted lifelong anonymity by the courts when he was released after serving a seven-year prison sentence.

DI Steven Grover (John Hannah) is in charge of investigating the crime against Myers and tracking down the person who put his details online. His boss, already far down the “no smoke without fire” road, is unsympathetic to the cause and the victim (you can add your own quotation marks or “apparently” as you see fit as the series unfolds. I think we’ll find ourselves scattering them with a liberal hand).

Grover is soon led to Liam’s mother, Anna, corroded by grief and ongoing fury at the “insult” of Turner’s sentence, and brilliantly played by Kelly Macdonald, more usually seen in (and constrained by) sweeter, simpler roles. It is she, it emerges, who is on trial for posting the information about Myers given to her by a third party, which amounts in the Crown Office’s eyes to incitement to murder.

There are, as you always hope for in the opening episode of a thriller, cross-currents meeting cross-currents and whirlpooling hints and possibilities, leaving the viewer bedraggled, with more questions than answers by the end.

It is a drama that resonates with its time by asking what constitutes a victim and how much leeway we allow in bestowing that status. Do they have to be perfect? How sure do we have to be? And what happens when the perpetrator becomes a victim too, of a different kind?

Does it matter that Anna’s decision may jeopardise her law-student daughter’s future? When the police access closed files to determine that Myers is in fact not Turner, how much does it cost characters – and viewers – to acknowledge their doubts were misplaced? It is a study in how willing and able we are to embrace nuance, accept degrees of sympathy and culpability, how we allocate compassion (is it a finite resource for some or all of us?), how we protect ourselves with denial, and how we seek to avoid or spread the moral load.

Complicating matters further down the stack is Grover himself, who is on secondment while his behaviour in his old post is investigated. He tries to speak to the woman whom it apparently involved, who tells him in no uncertain terms that “No means no”. Thus, the spectre of sexual harassment and worse suddenly looms over our last hope for a place to rest our certainties. In the #MeToo era, these are the very shiftiest of sands.

No doubt there will be more twists, turns and new suspects. Anna’s first husband, Liam’s father, is in prison but still remains a looming presence. He may prove to have tried to reach beyond the bounds of his cell to deliver retribution. And Myers’ wife, Rebecca, has told the police that she and her husband know little about each other’s pasts because they both had unhappy backgrounds and wanted to give themselves a chance to start again by building their own family together without all of that baggage. What that baggage is and whether it can be offloaded will surely form a fertile field in which another three hours of plot and psychological interrogation can flourish.

Enjoy your increasingly unstable week, my friends. I’d grab another whisky if I were you.