The question of what you would do if no one believed you is one of the most haunting there is. Believe you about what? Doesn’t matter. What happens if you feel a thing, know a thing or are having a thing happen to you, and you tell people – and no one takes you seriously?
That is the terrifying question at the heart of the four-part drama The Listeners, adapted by Jordan Tannahill from his book of the same name. The action is moved from the US to the UK, and Rebecca Hall (with a short haircut to allow for the ear-acting involved – you’ll see) plays Claire, a busy wife, mother, friend and a charismatic teacher of literature to teenagers at the local school. Then she, and she (apparently) alone, starts hearing a low, torturous, rumbling hum – from somewhere outside herself. She proves this by putting her fingers in her ears, whereupon it disappears. Her husband, Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah), suggests tinnitus and doctors can find no physical cause.
Noise-cancelling headphones can only take you so far. Soon Claire is unable to sleep (Paul moves with no good grace into the spare room); exhausted, she snaps at her students. She spends her nights searching for possible explanations on the internet. By the time one of her students, Kyle (newcomer Ollie West, doing well to establish himself as a presence next to one of Hall’s most intriguing performances), reveals that he hears the same thing, the situation is rife with vulnerabilities and ripe for exploitation. Kyle’s own mother “freaked out” when he told her, so now he is pretending it’s gone.
The pair investigate wind turbine sites and other possible external sources of the hum, before falling in with a support group of others who hear it and who, led by a charming husband-and-wife team, are learning to live with the sound. Maybe listen to it, as if it’s trying to tell us something. Maybe even learn to love it. Then everything will be fine.
From there, The Listeners delves deeply and unpicks delicately the needs, the motivations and the personalities of those who find what they may not even know they are searching for in conspiracy theories, alternative therapies, faith systems and cults. It looks hard at human frailties and foibles, as Claire is suspended for meeting a student outside school hours – and especially at how much we need to be seen, heard and understood by others, how fast we fall apart if that need is not fulfilled by our usual sources, and how quickly and desperately we go looking for fulfilment elsewhere.
As Claire and Kyle become more enmeshed in the group, larger issues about living in a post-truth world emerge. How do you apportion weight or value to the purported facts rushing at us 24/7 from more angles and at greater velocity than any human being was designed to withstand? How do you stop them subverting even a mind such as Claire’s, which prides itself on its rationality and intelligence?
Tannahill’s script and especially Janicza Bravo’s direction carefully layer overlapping uncertainties as they move through Claire’s story. The programme keeps you finely unbalanced throughout, as ideas about the boundary between supernatural and plausibly scientific explanations are introduced, unreliable narrators start – maybe! – entering into proceedings, and our capacity for collective delusion and denial – the strength of it, the protection it offers and the destruction wreaked by it in the end – are all dissected and laid out for horrified inspection. By the final episode, it has built a sense of thriller-ish and existential dread that is quite paralysing.
The only besetting flaw in the tale is that there is so much loving attention lavished on Claire and her unravelling that the other characters can feel underdeveloped. Claire’s husband, for example, seems too immediately impatient with her problem, even when it seems likely to be merely physical, and simply furious – rather than perhaps also baffled, curious, worried or saddened by her increasing reliance on the group. And her great friend Cass (Franc Ashman) has a similarly simplistic reaction; she drops Claire entirely as soon as news of her suspension reaches her. “Why would I want to ask a rapist anything?” she snarls, when Claire meets her in a cafe to try to build bridges. It’s a loud bum note in a thoughtful, thought-provoking drama otherwise full of nuance and put together with surpassing care and delicacy.
• The Listeners aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now.
