A mixture of legal drama, medical mystery and psychological thriller with creepy supernatural overtones, Insomnia sometimes seems to be trying to cram too much in, but it’s well worth sticking with it to the end to reap the full benefits. Not the least of its strengths are its classy production values and an excellent all-round cast, with Vicky McClure in the lead role of high-flying City lawyer Emma Averill, Leanne Best as her sister Phoebe, and Lyndsey Marshal throwing any number of flies into the ointment as Caroline Mitchell.
Emma and her husband Robert (Tom Cullen) have two children,18-year-old Chloe (India Fowler) and younger son Will (Smylie Bradwell), and they live (to borrow a Blur-ism) in a very big house in the country. Robert is benignly bearded and laid-back, in marked contrast to his wife, who is the epitome of the driven, career-orientated professional. She works for the law firm Buckley Baxter & Ahmed, whose Imax-sized windows afford panoramic views of St Pauls Cathedral and the Barbican, and she’s on the brink of being made a partner. She also does regular pro bono work to reassure us that she’s not merely a cynical bread-head (pictured below, at home with the Averills).
Yet as she approaches her 40th birthday, all is not entirely well with Emma. She’s suffering from chronic insomnia, but also does strange things during the night in a trance-like state, like lighting rows of candles and filling the bath with water. She’s also haunted by visions of her mother, Patricia (Camilla Marlowe), a ghastly Hammer-horror-like figure suffering from some kind of progressive psychotic condition, which first struck her when she turned 40. We see flashbacks (shot in sepia-esque colours through a fisheye lens) of Patricia trying to suffocate the young Phoebe, and watch her marching around the house reciting strings of apparently meaningless numbers. Scenes of the young Phoebe and Emma are reminiscent of the eerie twin sisters in Kubrick’s The Shining.
Emma is also tormented by recalling how her mother told her she had inherited her “bad blood”, and is terrified that she too will lose her mind. When she hides CCTV cameras around the house, they catch Emma’s nocturnal wanderings which seem to replicate her mother’s behaviour. At work, her personal assistant is baffled when she finds that Emma has recited those fateful strings of numbers into her dictaphone.
Amongst all this weirdness, screenwriter Sarah Pinborough (who adapted the series from her own novel) has found space to create plenty of drama around the Averills’ family life, not least the escapades of daughter Chloe, who is experimenting with such coming-of-age pastimes as cocaine and having an affair with an older man. The return of sister Phoebe (pictured below), who Emma hasn’t seen for a long time, screws the household tensions tighter, and the revelation that Emma has been pretending to her husband that her mother died years earlier, when in fact she’s in a secure nursing facility, doesn’t go down too well.
Many further hoops must be jumped through before we reach the end of the sixth and final episode, with Lyndsey Marshal’s Caroline becoming increasingly pivotal in unlocking the show’s various mysteries. The past, in this case, isn’t so much a foreign country, but more like a road map revealing how the present came to be in its scarily twisted state (episode three is aptly subtitled “This Family Is So Fucked Up”).
Nonetheless, Insomnia might have benefited from a bit of plot-decluttering. The supernatural dimension which helps make the opening episodes so gripping disappears for a while in later instalments, only to make a powerful late comeback which makes you realise what you’ve been missing. Also the way the Caroline character does a sudden nought-to-100mph acceleration to the foreground of the action bends the drama out of shape somewhat. A final hint that the baleful family curse may have further unpleasant surprises in store is a bit like ending a novel with a semi-colon. But once you start watching, you'll find it hard to stop.
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