The theme gets another spin when the birth of the Midwich cuckoo-babies prompts the arrival of a squad of Home Office bods, led by a smartly-suited Sam West, waving copies of the Official Secrets Act for the mothers to sign and marshalling technology to monitor their children’s every move. So parenting is already the fraught business it usually is without a strange force suddenly creating a blackout in several streets in the village and, mirabile dictu, impregnating all the women of childbearing age inside the zone. Stamping all their lives with a big "Endangered" sign, predictably, is an eerie electronic soundtrack that hints at the unsettling currents in this middle class rural idyll ( pictured below, Keeley feels spooked). Zellaby herself is a single mother, and her 23-year-old, Cassie (Synnove Karlsen), has unspecified “issues”. The piggish candidate for the council is having an affair with a colleague while his daughter struggles with separation anxiety and possible OCD DI Paul Haynes (a weathered-looking Max Beesley) is sheltering a headstrong sister-in-law who has fled a difficult partner the new couple in town (‘from London”, as if in the Chilterns that’s seen as another ecosystem) are struggling with fertility problems.
His Midwich is typical TV commuter land, with familial dysfunction fruitfully lurking behind all the Osborne & Little curtains, despite boasts that the place is “number 6 in the country” for raising children. That makes her the ideal focal point of David Farr’s makeover. There is still a Dr Zellaby serving picturesque Midwich, but this one is played by Keeley Hawes, and she’s not a GP but a touchy-feely family therapist. The preternaturally mature children of the title are now a tribute to diversity casting, though all have staring eyes that glow golden when their powers are engaged. Then the opening credit graphics roll, picturing a long vaginal tunnel of trees, at the end of which is … let’s say, it’s the hot-red gaping mouth of a cuckoo chick. The bones of the original plot are still there, but tricked out in concerns of a more contemporary kind.Ī brief prologue sets up the stakes: a couple trying to escape the family home are intercepted by an eerie child, who wags a reproving finger at them.
0 kommentar(er)
