Until I Kill You creeps up on you with its horrors. The development of Delia and John’s relationship is depicted with short scenes with spaces of months between them – the deterioration is illustrated as much by the slow collapse of Delia’s emotional state as by the events themselves. The certain knowledge that something is very, very wrong grows deeper and darker, crawls upon your skin … then explodes.
As charming psychopath Sweeney, Shaun Evans is superb. A million miles away from his clean-cut detective in Endeavour, Evans makes it quite easy to believe someone could fall for Sweeney, and just as easy to believe in his turn to monstrous violence in an utterly chilling performance.
However, the star is Anna Maxwell Martin as Balmer, a spiky, awkward character, difficult to warm to, rather than a conventional TV heroine. She struggles to relate to other people, going through life with a studied defensiveness clearly borne of a lifetime of failing to crack the social interaction code.
Maxwell Martin captures her complexity: world-weary, misanthropic, lonely, hopeful, sweet and funny by turns. Then, of course, as Delia’s life spins into nightmare, there is terror and desperation, and almighty courage and strength to come.
If anything elevates Until I Kill You above most true crime fictionalisations, it’s the combination of choices made by Maxwell Martin and writer Nick Stevens in bringing to the screen an extraordinary and quite unconventional protagonist – doubtless the real-life Delia Balmer is owed a tip of the hat here too.
The temptation is to label as “important” a show of this genre – a vital contribution to the discussion about violence against women and how we as a society deal with it. But to lumber a TV drama with such a weighty label is to give it too great a burden, especially given TV necessarily deals with only the most unusual and eye-catching stories.
Better simply to say that Until I Kill You is a compelling story, sensitively but grippingly told, and as such will contribute to our shared understanding of the world, as difficult as it is sometimes to look at unflinchingly.
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