The Level DVD review

Fresh from TV and onto DVD comes a story of a tangled web of deceit, smuggling, double-dealing and murder, set in and around Brighton and the Sussex coast.

The rolling Sussex coastline and its beautiful green/blue vista looks bleak and unwelcoming throughout the course of this convoluted story, whether Nancy is peering around the obelisk at Peacehaven, shivering in a knit ‘n’ spit on a deserted Hove Prom, or shambling nervously about the forbidding docks at Newhaven. Even Brighton’s normally lively streets are empty, as if the city has been evacuated. Nancy’s face wears a blank stare throughout the piece, as she tries to cope with her weeping wound, the fear of discovery, the killing of a man she admired - loved, even - and the precariously balanced friendship with her bereaved childhood friend. We find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of sympathising with someone whose record is a long way from being spotless, and wondering just how crooked she will prove to be.

Placed with the terse Gunner Martin (Noel Clarke) to investigate Frank’s murder, Gunner is immediately suspicious of Nancy’s lone wolf investigation style, and with the arrival of a fellow Met Officer previously friendly to Nancy but now, perhaps not, Nancy’s world is visibly shrinking, along with her confidence and her ability to keep head above water.

Frank’s widow, played with considerable subtlety by Amanda Burton, plays the co-operation game with the Police, leaving the emotional responses to her daughter, Hayley (Laura Haddock), an aloof chip off the old block, who is slowly distancing herself from her own past, and her old friend Nancy. Their grey modernist block-like house, peering out over the Channel, is the perfect metaphor for the fragile family that inhabits it.

The complex relationships and host of interested parties on show here are almost Dickensian in their secretiveness and closeness. Nancy can’t trust a soul, not even Hayley, wrapped up in her grief and her children, nor her estranged adopted ex-cop father, Gil (Gary Lewis) who turns up like the proverbial bad penny, in his familiar drunken state.  Frank’s driver/factotum Darryl Quinn (Lorne McFadyen), more hurt little boy than hard man, appears to be insinuating himself into the grief stricken family rather too successfully for comfort, as is another dubious business associate of Frank’s, Shay Nash (Joe Absolom, in a phoned-in performance that cuts no ice here) whose regular appearances before the Police and Courts marks him out as someone best avoided.    

Slow burning over three of its six episodes, and looking like it may not reach boiling point, ‘The Level’ finally lets loose at last in the fourth, building up a palpable sense of claustrophobia, self-doubt, guilt and mistaken motives, into a shattering climax on the Palace Pier.  

http://www.acorndvd.com/the-level.html