Olivia Colman and David Thewlis excel as benign-looking killers in Landscapers

When the convicted killers Christopher and Susan Edwards handed themselves in to police at London St Pancras International station in 2013, they carried with them a single euro, a change of clothes each and a bag of Hollywood memorabilia including letters, posters and a signed photograph of Gary Cooper. After 15 years of deception, the couple had reached the end of the road. They were finally ready to discuss the circumstances that led to Susan’s parents being shot dead and buried under the rhododendrons in their garden in the East Midlands town of Mansfield, and their bank accounts emptied.

Landscapers, a wildly inventive mini-series starring Olivia Colman and David Thewlis, tells their story, though this is not your regular police procedural. It is a tender tale of love, a black comedy and a surreal fantasy rolled into one. Directed by Will Sharpe and written by Colman’s husband Ed Sinclair, it plays fast and loose with the facts and doesn’t apologise for it, instead providing varying perspectives on the truth as dreamt up by those at the heart of the case.

When we meet the couple, they are on their uppers in France. Christopher is on his umpteenth job interview, where his fellow applicants are 25 years younger and, unlike him, fluent in French. Dinner is a single baked potato each, and wine glasses filled with water. Yet the daily lives of this quiet couple brim with love as they eat their meagre suppers by candlelight and hold hands on the sofa.

While we get snapshots of the investigation, Landscapers is more interested in the story the Edwards tell, and the efforts they go to protect one another. Most surprising — and completely delightful — are the moments in which the series breaks from reality altogether, parachuting the couple into the classic movies with which they are obsessed or, during police interrogations, walking them off set and into scenes from their pasts in kaleidoscopic reconstructions. Think Crimewatch transformed into promenade theatre.

The writers’ revel in the politesse of these benign-looking killers. As Susan hands her breakfast tray to an officer in her police cell, she says, with sincerity: “Scrambled eggs, they’re not easy to do in bulk are they?” Understandably, the police are less charmed by their new charges than we are. The story the couple tell — that Susan’s mother shot her husband, after which Susan shot her mother, hid both their bodies under the bed and then returned to bury them with her husband ­— is declared by officers, in unison, to be “bullshit”.

Turning a story of real-life murder into entertainment can be a perilous business, more so when the creators decline to tell it straight. But Landscapers is made with love and ambition, not prurience or snark. Rather than retreading grisly events, it immerses us in the lives of two complex people who, as Christopher’s stepmother points out, are not built for this world. Buoyed by remarkable performances from Colman and Thewlis that will surely see them festooned with awards, it is simultaneously funny, bleak and enormously moving. I’d take this over another re-enactment of the Ted Bundy story any day.

★★★★★

On Sky Atlantic and Now TV in the UK from December 7 and on HBO Max in the US now

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