Hysteria can have a magical quality. Whether it’s the “dancing plague” of 1518, where hundreds of medieval Alsatians found themselves inexplicably jigging, or the “laughing epidemic” that gripped colonial Tanzania back in 1962, inexplicable collective experiences can be as formative as they are unsettling. It is that conflict which BBC One’s new four-part drama, The Listeners, explores, as an unlikely group calcifies around a mysterious noise, even as their constituent lives crumble around them.
Claire (Rebecca Hall) is a teacher at a posh-looking school somewhere in non-specific rural England. She has a quiet domestic life with husband Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah) and their daughter, Ashley (Mia Tharia). Her life is simple – almost boring – until she begins to hear a constant, low, monotonous humming. Audiologists tell her that she’s physically fine, that it could be a sign of early menopause or anxiety. “Medically there’s nothing wrong with me,” she laments, “so that can only mean one thing…” And yet Claire doesn’t think the noise is “all in her head”, and that suspicion is confirmed when her most truculent student, Kyle (Ollie West), reveals that he too can hear it. Together, they enter a world of people obsessed by a noise that will bend, if not break, their lives.
Claire finds a community of sufferers, led by the enigmatic Omar (Amr Waked) and his more human-seeming partner, Jo (Gayle Rankin). But more troubling is her continued relationship – late night texts, long car drives, visits to remote spots – with young Kyle. Canadian writer Jordan Tannahill, adapting his own novel, starts things off as an exploration of a woman gripped by a physiological experience, but pushes on, into a more profound tale of emotional disintegration. “We’re trying to get to the bottom of this,” Claire tells her daughter. “This is the bottom mum,” Ashley replies, “you’ve hit it.”
American director Janicza Bravo is a darling of the indie scene, having worked with Lena Dunham and directed Zola, which holds the distinction of being the first movie based on a Twitter thread. And The Listeners feels like it should be in competition at SXSW, rather than in a primetime slot on BBC One. It has an aesthetic austerity – a natural coldness – that evokes the work of directors like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers. Indeed, the whole thing feels indebted to the horror genre. The sound design and music (particularly vital, given the story the series pursues) are unnerving – and as Claire’s tattered psyche frays further, disarming visual experimentation gets woven in. The characters look like they’ve just stepped out of a Toast catalogue, but the world around them has none of that Instagram-ready perfection.
Much of the success of this story, of a woman on the edge of (or plummeting from) a nervous breakdown, rests on Hall’s statuesque shoulders. Nobody acts with their neck quite like Rebecca Hall, and Bravo uses this otherworldly – almost extra-terrestrial – quality to compose, carefully, frames that synthesise that extraordinary anatomy with a tortured interiority. These almost painterly shots of Hall will, inevitably, make some viewers think – not incorrectly – that the hum, the show’s central McGuffin, is nothing more than a metaphor. And yet the drama is reliant on its premise to propel the narrative, because for all the native beauty, there is something icy about The Listeners. Claire is cool and pessimistic; Paul is frosty and unsympathetic; Kyle is raw and uncompromising.
This all means that viewers tuning in for a sci-fi adjacent tale – something like The Midwich Cuckoos, which inhabited a similarly abstract England – might be unsatisfied. And if the hum itself does not prove a particularly intriguing mystery, then the human drama is equally unresolved. Claire is not an emotionally expansive person, even as she comes to terms with her own unhappiness. “Our life is good,” she tells Paul, “but it’s also small.” Many shows that have artistic pretensions don’t peddle easy answers, but The Listeners doesn’t even offer easy questions. After all, “what is the hum?”, which seems so central, becomes increasingly irrelevant. Real or metaphorical: this is about the boundaries the noise dissolves.
And so, The Listeners can be challenging. But that doesn’t mean it won’t reward patient viewing. Bravo and Tannahill have created a parabolic nightmare that deploys genre conventions in service of an elliptical tale of human nature. What do we want? How do we attain it? What might we lose along the way? Far from light entertainment, then, The Listeners is a complex story of association and dissociation.
The Listeners is available on BBC iPlayer
