‘The Hum’, a low sound heard by a select few people, is an unexplained phenomenon that has been reported in various locations since the Seventies and formed the basis for writer Jordan Tannahill’s 2021 novel The Listeners. Now the BBC has adated the book into a four-part miniseries starring Rebecca Hall, relocating it from small-town America to middle England, where faith and conspiracy are a different kettle of fish.
Claire Kutty (Hall) is a secondary school teacher driven to the edge of a nervous breakdown by a strange, low rumbling noise that seemingly only she can hear. Insomnia and nosebleeds plague her.
Her bemused family encourage her to seek a medical explanation, but she comes up against an all-to-real dismissiveness of women’s health concerns from the medical profession. Could it be menopause? Stress? Perimenopause, perhaps? Infuriated, she demands more tests, all inconclusive. Her husband starts sleeping in the spare room. Headphones don’t make a dent in it.
An exhausted Claire finds out that recalcitrant student Kyle (Ollie West) can also hear the Hum and joins him on a clandestine hunt for the source, crossing professional lines out of desperation for an explanation.
And it turns out they are not alone. A support group of other “Listeners” is gathering nearby but what starts as an AA-style sharing circle quickly spills into pseudoscience about lightning followed by intense meditation sessions. Is this community, or a cult?
The first episode in particular is full of delicious horror tropes, underscored by a retro red title card straight out of Eighties slasher films. With her short flicky pixie cut and vintage nightgown collection, Hall’s Claire evokes Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. She’s a magnetic contemporary gothic heroine, creeping around her sterile new build home at night, falling down internet rabbit holes, taking ominous showers. Blood drips from her nose constantly. We always see her framed through reflective glass.
Later, it tips towards the psychedelic and science fiction, as Claire’s community turns on her and insomnia drives her to terrifying hallucinatory episodes. But director Janicza Bravo is always slyly suggesting mundane explanations for The Hum, wind turbines and electricity pylons looming in the distance. And who really are the Listeners?
Yet, this is not a mystery to be solved so much as a study of how far a person can be pushed before they snap – or drift before they are radicalised.
Hall is a revelation, able to communicate unease or frustration with the quirk of her eyebrows. As an audience surrogate, Claire is cannily written, at once entirely vulnerable but with a wise-cracking streak of humour and a natural skepticism.
She tries everything – research, professional help, an alternative explanation. A fictional character playing by normal rules in a potentially supernatural situation brings to mind China Miéville’s perfectly nasty short horror story Säcken. As the walls close in, there is no way out for Claire but through.
Sometimes the script over-extends itself to push her towards isolation and destruction. Her seemingly nice guy husband Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah) is unsympathetic to the point of implausibility, weirdly quick to assume the worst. Her former friend turns cruel.
Ashley (Mia Tharia), her daughter, is more believably mercurial as she sits her exams and prepares to transition from school to university. Tharia and West, the youngest in the cast, could steal a scene from anyone but Hall.
Shot, unusually, on film, it has the quality of a lucid dream, but one that might give you nightmares. The Listeners is best watched alone with headphones, all the better to freak yourself out with the soundtrack. The Hum realised here is not a simple monotone but an undulating mix of rising tones, choral vocalisations, guttural utterings. You might start to wonder if you can hear it, too.
The Listeners is on BBC One and iPlayer from November 19
