Eyewitness Review – a gritty drama about a British murder | Television

AAll murders are wonderful, but few are the ones that disrupt the human race Rachel Nickell she said in 1992. She was stabbed 49 times while walking on Wimbledon Common in the afternoon with her two-year-old son, Alex. The evil that happened in public and in front of a child, became dark in people’s minds, especially since Alex being the only witness kept the killer away for years.

It is a case that has been discussed, analyzed and dramatized, but not in the way that the Witnesses do. In its three parts, the narrative emphasis does not fall where we expect, because the main characters are not the police or the killer but the family that Rachel was left behind: Alex (Jahsaiah Williams, then Max Fincham as the eldest son) and his distraught father André (Jordan Bolger). This new approach to anxiety is proving to be beneficial.

André must deal with the grief of the death of his lover, the difficulty of being a single parent all night, the difficulties of caring for a traumatized boy and the demands of the police. The witness especially wants to know if Alex, who is too young for anyone to be sure that he understands what he saw, will also be destroyed by his efforts to remove any information that is locked in the brain of his schoolboy. André has to make a phone call to push him further.

Each of these is a task for which there is no instruction manual – how do you tackle it all together? The witness boldly gives you an indisputable answer, which André does not. She repeatedly makes choices that we and the people around her question, whether it’s expressing anger at Alex going crazy in front of the children’s clinic, or insisting that she take Alex to find out about Rachel’s body. The latter scene is unforgettable: the boy seems to know better than the man that nothing good will come of seeing his mother die, so he ignores his father and sits down, playing with dolls.

The story goes up in time, we see Alex as a teenager, rebelling in normal ways, and the special disagreement that existed between him and his father about how to deal with the past: Alex does not want to, but André knows that this is not sustainable. The battle between them can make them sad, struggling with problems they don’t know how to solve, and Bolger sometimes struggles to bring depth to the part that makes him sad and depressed all the time. When they do find a way, though, it’s a sweet, well-cut redemption.

Their situation would have been painful, but the Witness did not hesitate to show what made it so difficult. Even considering the history of the scandalous behavior of British tabloid journalists, their appearance here is surprising: they are everywhere, at André and Rachel’s house, at the police station and at the scene of the crime, an army that produces difficult questions that merge into a voiceless noise. When André escapes to his mother’s house, reporters and paparazzi search the area and camp outside, blowing up the barn and stealing the poles. After one visit with the police, André went up in the parking lot to the famous whipping wall, but now one of the monkeys is making a racist song in an attempt to get him to join them. André moved to France, and then to Spain, but even years after his murder and in another country, the media chased him and his son mercilessly. André and Alex live as fugitives.

If some facts are so frightening that it is difficult to believe, it is easy to do so considering how honest the Witness is about the imperfections of André and Alex, who discussed with the writer Rob Williams, after his death. This program deals in complex realities; How our TVs can affect us is one of them.

In the background are the police, and in the description of the leading police officer, Keith Pedder (Neil Maskell), is a flawed but sympathetic expert whose use of an undercover officer to arrest the main suspect, the innocent Colin Stagg, is a mistake made by a man who comes under great pressure from his superiors and, the media.

If both sides of the story and the subsequent arrest of the killer seem ridiculous, it gives us a strange relief from the problems of André and Alex. They had to live in it, without help or relief; The witness is the most important information about what hell was like.