4 out of 5

Created by: Kris Mrksa

UK TV of the scary story genre has a certain kind of ghostly tale that it tells time and again, with the same general style and same general mood: one part Japanese revenge haunting plus American soap opera twists plus the omnipresent cloudy, foggy, muddy blue British / Welsh / etc. sky equals countless iterations on spooks and such, with, very, very often (and certainly pre-dating Broadchurch) the plotline of a missing or dead child.  Good stuff certainly is produced from this template, but for better or worse, once you’ve seen it a few times, you’ve seen it, so your mileage will vary due to personal preference thereafter.

While, on one hand, part of what’s cool about Requiem is the way it swings from this standard to something much cooler and more thematically interesting, that it starts squarely in this format and very occasionally returns to it – phantoms in the mirror!  jump scares and music stings – makes the show too easy to dismiss.  Remnants of “normal” TV end up scattered about as filler red herrings and ultimately unimportant extra characters / subplots, but I decided to keep watching for a couple of important reasons that continued to be encouraging and rewarding during the entire runtime: while the show does touch on feelings between our two primary characters, Matilda (Lydia Wilson) and Hal (Joel Fry), it sticks more to their friendship, and bond as professional musicians – she is a renowned cellist and he her accompaniment – and thus doesn’t cheapen the way they act in support of each other (admittedly primarily Hal helping Matilda, as this is her story, but all the same…); their relationship absolutely strengthens the emotional component of the show by not distracting from it with She/He-Likes-Me-She/He-Likes-Me-Not nonsense.  Secondly, while this is superficial, it made a big impact for me as a viewer: the sound design is excellent.  Using Matilda’s cello as a musical anchor, the show’s themes are absolutely haunting and creepy, and end up winding into some elements from the narrative, which is a diegetic dream.  When whispered voices are added into the ambiance, instead of seeming like a generic spooky tactic, it feels earned by the story setup.

So: I kept watching.  And I’m hecka glad I did.

When Matilda’s mother commits suicide, it’s a completely out-of-character shock, sending Matilda on a hunt through some odd details from her mum’s life as to a reason why.  This sends her – with Hal along for the ride – to fictional Welsch town Penllynith, where she goes about getting the suspicious eye from locals as she discovers plenty of shady business.  And Requiem plays with our “shady business” expectations quite a bit, successfully arriving at angles to the story I’d definitely not expected.  Buffering the TVness of some of the stuff mentioned above is the very un-TVness of the way several core plot elements are left vague.  It’s just enough to creep us out, as well as keep us on edge, but diligently doesn’t explain away things to give us cleancut “good” or “bad” identifiers.

UK TV drops so many of these one-off shows that it becomes too easy to dump general classifiers on them.  Requiem doesn’t, initially, seem to offer justifications to exist beyond these generalisms, but it soon evolves into one of the more effective creepfests from recent years.