Somewhere Boy Channel 4 | All 4
The Watcher Netflix
Judi Love: Black, Female and Invisible Channel 4 | All 4
Deepfake Porn: Could You Be Next? BBC Three | iPlayer
Where do your monsters live? Under the bed? Inside your head? Channel 4’s new series Somewhere Boy, created and written by Pete Jackson, from the makers of The End of the F**king World, explores the idea of real and imaginary beasts through a pitiless rural fable that is all the more terrifying because it’s full of people trying to do the right thing.
The boy in question is Danny (Lewis Gribben), an 18-year-old stumbling wraithlike into the world after a childhood locked away by his dad in an isolated house. This is seen in flashback – a boarded-up, grotesquely distorted monument to parental overprotectiveness. The father, Steve (Rory Keenan), had a breakdown after his wife died in a hit-and-run. He builds Danny a warped safe space, full of old films and songs: Charlie Chaplin, Jo Stafford. When Steve tells Danny about the “monsters” outside, his eyes shine with love and madness. In time, Danny goes to live with his aunt Sue (Lisa McGrillis). When her initially irritated, unwelcoming son, Aaron (an excellent, naturalistic performance from Ladhood’s Samuel Bottomley), explains that there are no monsters, Danny retorts: “My dad wouldn’t lie to me.”
It’s easy to see why Somewhere Boy won this year’s audience award at the Series Mania television festival in France. It’s the oddest story: tender, uplifting, disturbing, melancholy. While Danny seeks justice for his mother’s death, it isn’t a revenge mission. Nor is it a recycled Room or (bar references to internet porn and social media) a rejigged Gen Z Greystoke: it would soon get wearisome were Danny a wide-eyed naif-savant endlessly opining about TikTok. This is a slow-reveal psychological horror (abuse delivered gift wrapped as parental love), but it’s also about youthful struggles and awkward bonding, with Aaron almost as vulnerable as Danny.
Comprising eight short episodes (all on All 4), Somewhere Boy could have been pruned even tighter. Nor is it without inconsistencies: where were the social workers during Danny’s childhood? However, these are quibbles. All the performances are first-rate. With his pale skin and haunted eyes, Gribben exudes the energy of the young Rutger Hauer; at every stage of Steve’s escalating psychosis, Keenan retains our sympathy. Clever camerawork communicates everything from stifling confinement to windswept isolation. The end, when it comes, is equal parts chilling and desperately sad. This year we have been craving something a bit different. Finally, here it is.
Naomi Watts was once memorably menaced in a house in the English version of Michael Haneke’s 2007 film Funny Games. If you want to be properly scared, look at that rather than bother with Netflix’s The Watcher, the seven-part true-crime thriller from uber-showrunner Ryan Murphy, about a family moving into a salubrious new home only to be besieged with creepy anonymous letters from someone called “the Watcher”.
I was looking forward to this, not least because of the mighty cast, including Watts and Bobby Cannavale as the married parents moving in, Mia Farrow and Margo Martindale as sinister neighbours and Jennifer Coolidge as an intense estate agent.
What a disappointment. After seven long hours I felt like writing my own anonymous letter: “Dear Ryan Murphy, buck your ideas up. The Observer Watcher.” The story is cluttered (satanism, ghostly music, at one point a dead ferret), but also repetitive and rather dull: another letter in the postbox? Big whoop! As if to compensate, the acting is overwrought, though I did enjoy Farrow’s wonderfully bonkers long plaits, giving her the look of a deranged senior citizen toddler. Tonally, it’s a frightening-ironic jerky ride: you get the impression the series is trying (and failing) to nail Disney+’s Only Murders in the Building-type humour.
I won’t divulge the denouement, except to warn that one blight of true crime series is the annoyingly damp squib ending. Ultimately, The Watcher is glossy and good-looking enough to be… watchable. But only just.
Back on Channel 4, Judi Love: Black, Female and Invisible sees the comedian investigating the phenomenon of “Misogynoir”: the specific dislike, distrust or prejudice directed at Black women. Her documentary features shocking UK statistics across different fields, among them education (Black Caribbean schoolgirls are twice as likely to be excluded than their white peers), crime (Black women are 25% more likely to receive a custodial sentence for the same crime) and childbirth (Black women are four times more likely to die as a result).
Love also explores entrenched misogynoir stereotypes and insults, from “aggressive Black woman” to “You’re pretty for a Black girl”. The programme really ignites when she chats with others: schoolgirls, mothers doing a podcast, a high-end casino croupier who won a race discrimination case when a wealthy client was permitted to spout racist abuse.
I would have liked more on the impact of poverty, but Love, who has a background in social work, is a convincing, no-nonsense presenter who delivers an interesting, pacy, packed hour. Perhaps too packed: given the amount of content, it could have stretched to a three-part series.
Over on BBC Three, another documentary, Deepfake Porn: Could You Be Next?, looks into how, far from being a grim celebrity-based phenomenon, anyone’s innocent online images could be turned into hardcore pornography. Model turned presenter Jess Davies is blunt: “Imagine a world where any woman could end up in a porn film without their consent. We’re in this world now.” She interviews those targeted by deepfakes (who wearily acknowledge that nothing disappears from the internet), and those who fight it: one successful campaigner, Kate Isaacs from the #NotYourPorn campaign, was bombarded with rape threats.
There seems an obvious intersection with incel culture here: what better revenge for the sexual rejection of womankind than their pornographic humiliation? For ever. Not only are deepfakes increasingly easy to make and lucrative, they’re not yet illegal. Davies also talks to those involved in deepfakes, including a site called MrDeepFakes which attracts 13m visitors a month. In a smart meta-twist, they appear as their own deepfakes. Watching them speak, their faces seamlessly morphing, deftly illustrates the trouble we’re all in.
Star ratings (out of five)
Somewhere Boy ★★★★★
The Watcher ★★
Judi Love: Black, Female and Invisible ★★★
Deepfake Porn: Could You Be Next? ★★★
What else I’m watching
Ros Atkins: On the Week
(BBC One)
A new show in which BBC News analysis editor Ros Atkins examines the week’s biggest stories, assisted by his fact-packed “explainer videos”.
Mercury Prize 2022: Album of the Year
(BBC Four)
Coverage of last week’s awards ceremony, which saw Little Simz win with Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, features performances from nominees Wet Leg, Sam Fender, Self Esteem, Nova Twins and Kojey Radical. Bad news for Harry Styles devotees: he’s on tour and sends a video.
The Peripheral
(Prime Video)
Based on the William Gibson book, this new sci-fi drama (near-future; alternative reality) from the team behind Westworld stars Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass), Gary Carr and Charlotte Riley.
