Adapted by Megan Gallagher from one of Mo Hayder’s Jack Caffery novels (the seventh one, apparently), Wolf might be described as Welsh Gothic, spiced up with a splash of gratuitous sadism. Episode two, for instance, is titled merely “Torture”, which might apply to some of the acting as much as the dramatic content.
Not that it doesn’t have its fair share of notable thesps. Somehow they’ve lured Juliet Stevenson aboard as Matilda Anchor-Ferrers, preparing to be scared to death as she, her husband Oliver (Owen Teale) and daughter Lucia (Annes Elwy, all pictured below) find themselves the targets of a pair of sneering, cold-blooded… well, you have to wait a while to find out exactly what they are. But they’re certainly not the police detectives they pose as when they knock on the door of the Anchor-Ferrers’ agreeable Monmouthshire mansion.
The story pivots around a stomach-turning crime known as the Donkey Pitch Murders, in which, five years earlier, teenagers Sophie and Hugo were hunted down by a man wearing a Hazmat suit and gas mask. Or... was it really only one man? Then, among the ruins of some mouldering medieval-looking structure, they were disembowelled and had their entrails hung on a tree. Tasteful. A man called Minnet Kable was arrested and confessed to the crimes, and is now in jail. But why is it that, on the anniversary of the killings, somebody has mocked up a ghastly facsimile of the murder scene in the Anchor-Ferrers’ garden?Since the story is from the Jack Caffery books, logic dictates that it must be DI Jack Caffery who finds himself in the midst of the action. In approved TV-detective style, Caffery (Ukweli Roach) has his own burden of emotional trauma that he carries around with him. This is the disappearance of his younger brother Ewan 25 years earlier, never to be seen again. Jack harbours a grim conviction that his paedophile neighbour Ivan Penderecki (Anthony Webster) was the perpetrator, but though this Penderecki can often be seen leering malevolently at Jack through his window, there’s a distinct whiff of red herring about him.
None of the moving parts of this show feel that they’re really connected to each other, though whether that’s by accident or by design is not entirely clear. For instance, there’s Jack’s bedside manner. Visiting Ella, a hideously-battered wife recovering in hospital, Jack torments the poor woman by spelling out in almost pornographic detail all the horrific head injuries she’s bound to suffer if she fails to give him a statement, and the way her head and body will be sawn up by the pathologist after her death.Not surprisingly, Jack’s private life is not an advertisement for emotional well-being and harmony. His partner Veronica (Kezia Burrows) despairs of the way Jack treats his absent brother’s room as a shrine that must not be touched. Her tactic of telling him (falsely) that she’s suffering a recurrence of cancer in order to trigger a shake-up in their relationship is a milestone moment in TV implausibility.
But “realism” isn’t really on the agenda here, as the Anchor-Ferrers’ intensely irritating home invaders make clear. Posing as DS Molina (Iwan Rheon) and DI Honey (Sacha Dhawan, both pictured above), these two frolic around the house, smirking and gibbering complete nonsense, as though they’re in a surrealist free-movement class. Honey takes the shark-jumping prize for the farcical scene where he mimes along to Figaro’s aria from The Barber of Seville, brandishing a sword which he plunges into… no, that would be telling. The only sensible one in this whole farrago is the Anchor-Ferrers' little white terrier. All six episodes are up now on BBC iPlayer, if you’re brave enough.