Sadly Over-hyped

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

We should know by now, from bitter experience, that when a copper is coming up for retirement it's a sure sign that something very, very nasty is about to happen.So when DC Len Harper (David Threlfall) walks out of the nick for the final time we've already guessed that he's soon going to be taking on the biggest challenge of this life. Maybe all police officers should simply start work on the first day of their retirement. It might dramatically improve the crime statistics."What Remains" begins with a flashback as chubby, innocent-faced Melissa (Jessica Gunning) moves into the attic flat of No 8 Coulthard Street. Something about Melissa says "victim" right away. We fear for her safety. Our sphincters twitch uncontrollably in our trousers.Clearly something's not quite right about this house. For a start, it looks exactly like the property in Simon Pegg's "Spaced", and several of the residents appear to have recently relocated from either Lark Rise or Candleford. There's also at least one familiar face from "Luther" which is scary in itself.Poor old Melissa should pack her bags and leave right away, but instead, in true "Scooby Doo" fashion, she climbs up into the loft on her own and gets strangled by a mysterious stranger.So, whodunnit? Grumpy old maths teacher Joe Sellers (David Bamber) is straight into the frame. For a start he has one of his ex-pupils Liz (Denise Gough) locked up in the basement, and he tups her wheezily at every opportunity. Meanwhile young Liz is less of a prisoner than we might think, and is secretly boffing the big eared boy from upstairs (Russell Tovey), while his very pregnant girlfriend is busy painting the nursery an unpleasant shade of duck egg blue.While all this is going on, we discover that prior to the murder Kieron Moss (Steven Mackintosh) was cheating on his journalist girlfriend Patricia (Claudie Blakley) by regularly popping upstairs and using poor Melissa as a human trampoline. Following this athletic intercourse it's hard to see how the architectural integrity of the house survived, but somehow the building remained standing long enough for the murder to take place.Other suspects include a couple of bitchy lesbians on the second floor (one of whom likes to bully the other by tying her up with straps), and Kieron's teenage son Adam, who spends the whole time trying to get into the knickers of his father's girlfriend. What's not to like? Everything and everybody.I enjoyed this 4 part BBC1 drama, but it really was quite difficult to identify with any of the characters. They were all, at best, flawed, and most of them were just downright nasty.Even with this in mind, I don't think any of us were prepared for the final episode, which left the claustrophobic and carefully distressed set littered with corpses and splattered with claret.There was us thinking there was only one killer on the loose, and the woodwork turned out to be crawling with psychopaths – the denouement making the climax of Macbeth look like a picnic scene from The Famous Five.OK, it was all a bit contrived, particularly when DC Len reached for his bow and arrow, but the twists and turns were so expertly engineered by writer Tony Basgallop that in the end we would forgive him anything.Stylishly directed by Coky Giedroyc, "What Remains" turned out to be one of my favourite drama series of 2013 so far, but sadly I don't think there's going to be a second series. Everyone's dead.Read more TV reviews at Mouthbox.co.uk

This four part thriller shown on the BBC on consecutive Sundays turned out to be an excursion into modern-day Gothic melodrama mixed in with a good old-fashioned whodunit. Along the way it tries to make points about neighbourliness, loneliness and control as all of the inhabitants of a small block of flats conveniently seem to forget about the existence of the young, fat, solitary female who lived in the top-floor flat until two years after her disappearance, her bodily remains are discovered in the loft above her apartment, triggering the narrative.Cue red-herrings galore and a backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards use of flashback to fill in the lead-up to the slain girl's demise. The viewer is kept guessing as to who the actual perpetrator is with a veritable procession of possible candidates paraded before us, including a seedy old teacher and the mysterious young woman he keeps in his flat, a pair of lesbians, one nasty and dominating, the other humane but servile, a careworn divorcée male newspaper editor, his reporter girlfriend and surly, hormonal teenage son, who are all joined by a young couple, him a feckless jack-the-lad, her a good-natured Indian girl, heavily pregnant, who move into the flat below the dead girl's and who actually make the grisly discovery.Brought into investigate the death is crusty old soon-to-retire police detective David Threlfall, another Mr Lonely himself, who seems to relate to the dead girl so much that he pursues the case even after his last day on the job (and after his former colleagues have all moved on to their next cases) to the extent of staying overnight in her long abandoned flat, indeed for the epilogue we see him actually living there. He hits it off with the young mum-to-be and together they try to solve the mystery, indeed they are, along with the girl reporter, the only halfway decent people in the whole cast, the rest being an unappealing mixture of the venal, duplicitous, vindictive and just plain mean. For me this made it hard to relate to the bulk of the characters and stretched credibility to breaking point, I mean just how many horrible people can you fit into a block of flats at the same time?Anyway, it winds it way to an over-the-the-top gory ending, with more than one dumb way to die along the way. Somewhere in it all is probably a moral about looking out for your neighbours, but along the road, the writer and director seemingly got consumed by some mystical Gothic bug and decided to try and whip up a kind of "I Know What You Did In the Loft" finale. It's reasonably well acted, although I'm tiring a little of Stephen MacKintosh's pained look in every character he portrays but on the whole this was an okay, if very incredible, whodunit, whydunit and howdunit which at least had me stumped up until the end.

At heart, What Remains is an updated version of the country-house who-dunnit, a woman is murdered in a house that's been converted into 5 flats, and it's assumed that one of the other residents did it.There's few tangible clues as to what happened so there's little for forensics to do - this is not CSI/Silent Witness. Instead the clues lie in the psychology and relationships of the residents - it's a bit Stephen Poliakoff in the way they're all prisoners of their pasts. So it explores the relationships of the suspects in a depth that you wouldn't normally see from Miss Marple.Then on top of that you've got a few classic horror-movie buttons being pushed (not altogether successfully) and the hangdog detective working past his retirement date on just one last case. "You've all given up on finding the murderer, we owe it to this girl to find out what happened". It's a cliché because it works.I can see why some people find the first half a bit slow, it's deliberately meant to be "static" and a bit claustrophobic with the vast majority of the action happening within the house. It maybe helped that I recorded it and watched the whole thing in one sitting, so didn't have a week to think about how little had apparently happened in any one episode.On the other hand there's a few sub-plots in the middle that don't move the plot forward at all, they're just there so Giedroyc can expand his theme of loneliness in the city. It feels a bit self-indulgent when some of the residents' stories are left hanging at the end, either because he didn't know where to go or 20 minutes got left on the cutting room floor, it would be more satisfying if they had been resolved. I suppose it says something that you do care enough to want to know how things work out for them.So this is not a show for people looking for car chases and shootouts. Personally I preferred Jane Campion's Top of the Lake which the BBC aired in the same slot a few weeks before. But if you've run out of Scandinavian detective box-sets to watch then this is a decent enough way to spend an evening.

I was looking for something to watch, and I noticed it was the pilot episode, so I watched this woman walk in, enjoy her chocolate bar, and suddenly go upstairs!...What follows is the feeling of Alice in wonder land wondering how deep the rabbit hole goes...It's an interesting way to pilot a series, starting with the very end first. I did not expect it and I feel it's playing well between how the characters are in the present, and as depicted in the past. Rating it a 10/10 because I came here looking for season 1 episode 3 to watch! The suspense is certainly there with this show, none of the characters feel out of place and actually you really have to wonder what role they all are going to play in upcoming episodes.