We need a word for a thriller that isn’t very thrilling. A thrillish? A thrill-err? Platform 7, a four-part adaptation of Louise Doughty’s 2019 bestseller of the same name, is one of them.
I should say that there is an unavoidable spoiler ahead, although I hope it is not too great as the official reveal comes early on in the first episode and, unofficially, even earlier for viewers who have watched television before.
A young woman called Lisa (Jasmine Jobson) is trapped in a train station, a year on from dying under the wheels of a train, with no memory beyond fragments of her life. Her spirit goes unseen and unheard until a troubled man, Edward (Phil Davis), throws himself in front of another train and joins her in the purgatorial afterlife. When Lisa’s parents and her boyfriend, Matt (Toby Regbo), visit to lay flowers at the spot where she died, she finds she is able to follow them out of the station and roam the wider world. The flashbacks thus prompted allow her to piece together those fragments of memory and she soon discovers that Something Is Amiss. She was a teacher, she was happy, she was loved, so why would she (as the investigation into her death asked) take her own life? As her father says on the station platform: “It doesn’t make sense. She had everything going for her.”
“Dad was right,” she says to herself later, as she walks spectrally around Matt’s flat. “None of it makes sense.” It is a very, very thin script. The veteran Davis does what he can with it and is an immutably powerful presence, but the rest of the cast is young and has insufficient resources on which to draw. It feels like a long watch at best.
On, however, we go. Lisa finds a newspaper article that states the court heard she had mental health problems. She does not recall any such problems. She visits her parents, where her dad is unaccountably painting a huge birdhouse bright blue in the sitting room. “You feel it too,” she equally unaccountably says into silence. “That something’s not quite right about this.” There is something not quite right about him painting a huge birdhouse bright blue in the sitting room (unless it is going to become instrumental to the denouement, which I doubt), but beyond that, they don’t seem visibly riven by suspicions.
She witnesses a visit to her parents by her best friend Izzy (Rhiannon Clements). We know she was her best friend because Lisa’s dad says: “You were like the sister she never had. Her words, not mine.” But Matt, apparently, never visits. This is about the point at which you can bring out your thrill-err bingo card and start crossing off squares.
No evidence for the sudden, deep depression that Matt says she fell into? Check!
An eager young police officer investigating Edward’s death becomes increasingly concerned that Something Is Amiss with Lisa’s death at the same spot a year ago? Check!
A colleague who doesn’t know anything about Lisa’s supposed depression either, but is unnaturally fully on board with Matt’s version of events? Check!
An apparent weirdo/possible stalker at her semi-remembered birthday party to muddy the waters? Check!
A final scene to confirm our basic suspicion about the night in question, but not to close down any options regarding a solution to the mystery? Check!
The pace picks up a little in later episodes. Edward’s backstory is filled in, with none too startling a twist. The shoddiness of the initial investigation into Lisa’s death strains credulity. Lisa continues to say things such as “You feel it too. Something happened here” to people who – and the viewer increasingly feels their good fortune – cannot hear her. Connections between characters are revealed, signposts are hammered into the narrative ground every few steps, and I’m still more intrigued by the birdhouse than anything else.
The programme maintains a ponderous, earnest tone throughout, as if trying to give due weight to the matter of the suicide(s) on which it depends for its plot, even though it is not a study of the subject and either needs to make it so or jettison its guilt. It feels like a waste of some good actors and a bleak bit of filler in the Christmas schedules. But diehard thriller/thrillish/thrill-err fans may find enough in Ghost Girl Under a Train to keep them going until one at full throttle steams into view.
• Platform 7 is on ITVX.
