I have said it before, but I will say it again: what a paucity of content there would be in the world, let alone the television schedules, if there were no violence by men against women. What an unrecognisable place it would be; how unimaginable to us all.
Until I Kill You is a drama that more than any of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of representations I have seen over the years gives some sense of the fathomless damage done and the strength required by survivors to overcome their experiences – by which I mean find some peace, some way to live their irreparably changed lives thereafter.
Its four relentlessly confrontational parts are based on the book Living With a Serial Killer, an account by Delia Balmer of surviving repeated physical and sexual assaults – one of which nearly killed her – by her boyfriend John Sweeney. He confesses to the murder of one ex-girlfriend while he has Delia held hostage; when the police eventually arrest him, he is convicted of two and suspected of at least three others.
Anna Maxwell Martin plays Delia, a fiercely independent free spirit, with none of the hippy-ish softness that may imply. She is an acquired taste – and few of her colleagues at the hospital where she works as an agency nurse have been inclined to acquire it. She is socially awkward, frank to the point of rudeness and uncompromising in her dealings with people.
These people include, until he turns horribly violent, the man she meets in a pub and with whom she begins, in her idiosyncratic and uncompromising way, to have a relationship. From there, we begin the tale of his savagery, police incompetence and her mental and physical survival that the long pursuit of justice does so little to aid.
In many respects, it follows what we might call the traditional trajectory of a domestic-violence drama, but in Delia’s fierceness and oddness we find someone who doesn’t so much ignore red flags, but rather is furiously baffled yet unbowed by the illogicality of his behaviour. (“You say you are my boyfriend, but …”) It illuminates the abuser’s tactics from a slightly different angle.
Sweeney is played by Shaun Evans, in a marked change of pace from starring as a young Morse in the genteel Endeavour. He matches what is probably a career-best performance from Maxwell Martin: human; charming at first, but increasingly monstrous thereafter; altogether terrifying. A fellow free spirit, but one bent only on harm.
We leave the main narrative occasionally to follow the slow progress of a missing persons case in Amsterdam. A woman called Melissa has disappeared. Despite her father’s continued pushing of the police, it is not until a dismembered body is recovered from a canal that anyone starts to join dots and DNA and follow them to a conclusion.
Until I Kill You does a rare and admirable job of maintaining Delia’s striking spikiness. As her traumas mount, they make her harder, angrier and more difficult for sympathetic officers and the few friends and family she has to reach. It is a reaction as valid – and maybe as common in reality – as any other, but one rarely depicted on screen, so frightened are people (producers, I suspect) of alienating their audiences and so untrusting that viewers can be brought to understand anything other than the simplest explanations and responses.
Here, though, the writer, Nick Stevens (who, as the creator of The Pembrokeshire Murders and In Plain Sight, is becoming a specialist in the bleakest murders and murderers), the director, Julia Ford, and in particular Maxwell Martin are fearless. Watching it, you feel for once as if you are being treated like an adult in possession of genuine, perhaps even complex, intelligence.
Until I Kill You is an extraordinary portrait of survivors’ suffering. But there is no scurrying after sensationalism. The worst episodes are evoked, not lingered on. As well as providing a tribute to the depth of Balmer’s courage – and by extension that of all those like her – it is also a testimony to the banality of evil. It insists on the essential pitifulness – not pitiableness – of these men and the needs they serve. It is a magnificent treatment of a damnable, unending subject.
• Until I Kill You airs on ITV1 and is available on ITVX
