Wolf review — BBC1 dark-hearted thriller is filled with tenuous twists

Receive free Television updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Television news every morning.

It has been said that waiting and wondering can be the most excruciating part of torture. Chained-up and separated in their own home, a family is left suspended in a state of queasy dread of what fate awaits them and oblivious as to why. Intermittently, their captors stop by to taunt them with insinuations about their motives.

Wolf, a new six-part BBC thriller based on a pulpy bestseller, should be anticipated with a degree of trepidation. It is a dark-hearted show that wilfully plumbs the nihilistic depths of human cruelty and treats fear, spite and trauma as plot devices rather than psychological states. Across two distinct but ultimately linked narrative strands, Wolf confronts us with a catalogue of horrors: hostage taking, child kidnappings, sinister cults, masked killers and disembowelled bodies. At times our stomachs churn while our eyes roll at the overripe production.

The sharper of the plot lines sees two men impersonating police officers — a menacingly arch poseur (Sacha Dhawan) and his doltish accomplice (Iwan Rheon) — in order to hold a husband (Owen Teale), wife (Juliet Stevenson) and their adult daughter (Annes Elwy) prisoners in their Monmouthshire manor house. The point of reference initially seems to be Austrian “provoc-auteur” Michael Haneke’s sadistic home invasion film Funny Games, with the victims similarly subjected to performative brutality (though the leader’s penchant for mixing violence with operatic flourishes is perhaps more evocative of The Simpsons’ Sideshow Bob). Things gladly turn playful when the perpetrators start to realise they are being toyed with by an unseen tormentor. Suddenly no one, least of all us, has any idea who’s in control.

A few miles away, a real cop happens to be unofficially reopening a cold case involving two local teens who were gruesomely murdered five years earlier. Troubled by inconsistencies in the original investigation, and haunted by unresolved traumas from his own past (of course), broody rogue Jack (Ukweli Roach) embarks on a tortuous quest for buried truths that eventually leads to the events of the present.

Connections between the stories — and a third subplot about Jack’s missing brother — are teased out throughout the series. But the rushed, tenuous twist that joins the threads is not sufficiently rewarding to justify combining a suspenseful single-location chiller with a meandering, cliché-clotted detective drama. While there’s generally enough twisting intrigue to keep us watching, we’re left with the feeling that there’s a much more taut three-parter lost here in a show needlessly double the length. The ending hints at the possibility of a second series. I can’t imagine the wait for it will be too agonising.

★★★☆☆

On BBC1 and iPlayer from July 31 at 9pm. New episodes air weekly on Monday and Tuesday