Two of the grisly murders that take place in Wolf (Tuesday, 9pm, BBC One) happen in an area called “the donkey pitch”. The murders are not inherently funny but every time a gnarled police officer or suited and booted detective speaks gravely of the donkey pitch murders, or what happened at the donkey pitch, I wondered if they might have been prudent to choose a less asinine location. To me, the word donkey is more goof than oof.
The donkey pitch turns out to be a harbinger of the sort of tonal dissonance to come from this unusual, theatrical series, which feels far more Channel 4 than it does BBC One, and I still can’t work out if that’s a compliment or an insult. It is based on Mo Hayder’s Jack Caffery novels, about a detective who specialises in the most twisted of cases, so if you’re familiar with that work, its gruesomeness may not come as much of a shock. I was not familiar with it, so I’ll admit that all the viscera added an unexpected internal-organ-ey note.
There are two timelines, separated by a few days, before a third storyline, from five years earlier, comes into play. It’s quite confusing, but the best way of enjoying Wolf is, it seems, to just go with it and assume that it is taking you somewhere. Besides, everyone behaves in the exact opposite way that any rational person should behave. Caffery (Ukweli Roach) spends his free evenings staring out of his (presumably dead) little brother’s window at the neighbour whom he believes abducted and murdered that brother 25 years ago. His girlfriend Veronica has, frankly, had enough of this sort of thing. “I’m not trying to be insensitive, but it was decades ago,” she huffs. Get over it, mate, she’s got a party coming up and she wants to give everyone a tour of the weird attic shrine her boyfriend has kept untouched since 1998 without bringing the mood down, yeah?
In his professional life, Caffery is the sort of blunt, straight-talking copper who tells a victim of domestic violence that unless she reports her husband, she’ll end up a decomposing corpse and the coroner will have to do all sorts of grotesque things to her body. Just telling it like it is, babe. Caffery has recently returned to London from Cardiff, because of the brother and the unsolved disappearance and, as always with thrillers such as this, he’s gruff and private because there’s something we don’t know about what he left behind.
It all weaves back to Monmouthshire where, a few days earlier, a family of caricature toffs, the Anchor-Ferrers, fled in the opposite direction, leaving their London pad for residence in their country pile, which happens to be very close to the donkey pitch. If the London side of the story is a Luther-ish noir, then the Welsh side is a game of True Detective-themed Cluedo, as things go bump in the daytime and the family find intestines dripping from the trees. It is intensely creepy, and then two police officers, played by Sacha Dhawan and Iwan Rheon, turn up just in time to find out why the phone line has been cut.
I spent a lot of the first episode wondering what was supposed to be so different about a series that seemed like a fairly stodgy murder mystery, and why most of the characters sounded as if they were speaking in translation. I spent the last 10 minutes thinking: I can’t believe I’m going to have to watch this whole thing to see if it’s going where I think it’s going. This is the sort of thriller that it is difficult to write about in advance without ruining it completely, but I will say that anyone who has watched some of these actors in previous roles may not be totally blindsided.
If episode one plays it straight and moody, then by episode two, any sense of lingering restraint has chucked itself out of the window. A dog is force-fed jewellery. There are sex scenes intercut with an operatically soundtracked, heavily choreographed murder. The villainy is ripe and the nihilism is strong. I thought I was laughing in its vague direction, but I think I was laughing with it, which is deeply unsettling, given that it starts with the disappearance of a child and merrily makes its way through cancer, kidnap and “innards strung around like tinsel”. Slapstick and serial killers make uneasy bedfellows. I imagine it will be divisive.
