[imagesource: HBO]

Academy Award-winning Olivia Colman’s versatile acting has been put to the test with her darkest role yet.

Performing alongside the similarly brilliant David Thewlis, they are a seemingly ordinary British couple who get caught up in an extraordinary murder investigation after a dead body is found in their garden in Landscapers.

The story is based on the real lives of Susan and Christopher Edwards, who were convicted in 2014 for murdering Susan’s parents and hiding the truth for the next 15 years.

Although Landscapers isn’t just a clear cut true-crime limited series.

Rather, as The Telegraph notes in a glowing five-star review, it is a “category-defying miniseries” that is “half-true crime thriller” and “half-quirky romance”, making it “one of the most breathtakingly beautiful dramas you’ll see all year”:

The script might draw on extensive research and hours of interviews with those connected to the case but Landscapers is no conventional crime drama.

It’s not a whodunit because we know full well who done it. It’s not a police procedural because the inept detectives are mainly played for laughs. Instead it’s a shattering portrayal of love, trauma and co-dependency.

Alright, now that you know what genre(s) it is, it’s time for the trailer:

Interestingly, everyone who worked on the series is really rather close.

Landscapers is “exquisitely, tenderly, and comically” written by Colman’s husband Ed Sinclair, according to The Guardian, while the director Will Sharpe worked with Colman in his recent creations Flowers:

It’s impossible to know from news reports, which deal in dry and police-filtered facts, how true the drama’s portrait of the Edwards is. But the vision offered by Sinclair, Colman and Thewlis is of a devoted couple, whose needs and abilities seamlessly slotted together to become one indivisible whole, and it’s heartbreaking and utterly convincing.

The review (also a five-star) goes on to praise Sharpe’s directing, which surreally switches from black and white to green or red-filters as it goes along, creating an overall “macabre and magical, hallucinatory and heightened” visual trip.

Landscapers is made up of four episodes, all of which have now aired in the UK.

[sources:telegraph&guardian]