Channel 4's six-part adaptation of Sarah Moss's novel Summerwater is a deeply confused drama. The acting is melodramatic, the tone bewildering, and the plot is full of cartoonishly grim situations that go nowhere. Set in a rain-lashed lochside holiday village, each cabin contains a uniquely unhappy household about to endure a reckoning on one particular day.
The series opens with characters being interviewed by police about a fire, but the cause and outcome are not revealed until the final episode. The story is an interlinked anthology, showing the same day from different perspectives. The first episode focuses on Justine (Valene Kane), a wife and mother whose obsessive long runs are punctuated by attempts to dispose of evidence of a crime. The show fails to replicate the novel's detailed inner monologues and lacks narrative substance, relying instead on baleful stares and threatening shots of Scottish trees and water.
Subsequent episodes follow an empty nester couple haunted by paths not chosen, a teenage boy humiliated by a breakup, and a young Eastern European couple working at the local hotel. All are phenomenally unhappy in implausible situations, their stories stifled by melodramatic acting. The immigrants' loud music late at night looks set to be someone's fatal tipping point.
Summerwater's occasional tilts towards other genres, such as a brief use of Roy Orbison's In Dreams suggesting Lynchian horror, are fleeting. A supernatural element involving a mysterious hut in the woods needed either to feature much more or not at all. The drama ends up as a mess that makes you want to back out of the room slowly and carefully.
