The Dark review – ITV’s terrifying cop show has pitch-black levels of grimness

True to its name, ITV’s new primetime detective drama is dark. Really dark. Pitch-black levels of grimness and intrigue enough to effectively entice the British viewer, who by now is desensitised to seeing just any old dead body on screen. No, the corpses we want to pore over with our nighttime cuppa and chocolate digestive have to be unusually grisly to get our attention, and the ones in The Dark fit the bill – killed with meticulous, psychopathic care by a meticulous, psychopathic killer. Did I mention he wears a creepy mask too?

An adaptation – is anything not, these days? – of GR Halliday’s crime novel From the Shadows, the six-part show taps into that familiar human impulse: to edge closer to what disturbs us and linger on it in HD for 45 minutes, not including ad breaks. In the Scottish countryside, tough-as-nails DI Monica Kennedy (Laura Donnelly) and her new partner, the town’s Casanova, DC Connor Crawford (Mark Rowley), are on the hunt after the body of a teenage boy is found naked and staged in the wilderness. Another follows; it seems a serial killer is on the loose.