The Veil (Ch4)
TV schedules are like lumpy porridge. Sometimes, you dig in and get plenty to chew on. At other times, it can be pretty thin gruel.
A packed Sunday night saw the launch of new serials on BBC1, ITV and Channel 4. By Tuesday, we had nothing to pick from but women’s football, the Sewing Bee, a Repair Shop rerun and the tail end of various dramas.
But that’s what catch-up services are for. When there’s nothing on, you always have something else to watch.
I confess I skipped Elisabeth Moss‘s new thriller The Veil at the weekend. Ch4 has only just finished showing the final series of her dystopian fantasy The Handmaid’s Tale, which long ago collapsed into nonsensical, repetitive hysteria.
Still, The Veil is written by Peaky Blinders‘ creator Steven Knight, and all six episodes are now available to stream at Channel 4 online, so I thought I’d give it a go. What an excellent decision that was.
Knight’s stories are usually convoluted, multi-character pieces of theatre, but this is different — practically a two-hander between Moss and her co-star, Yumna Marwan.
Steven Knight’s stories are usually convoluted, multi-character pieces of theatre, but this is different – practically a two-hander between Elisabeth Moss (above) and her co-star, Yumna Marwan
Josh Charles (left) and Dali Benssalah (right) feature in this clever and compelling spy drama
Marwan plays Adilah, a Frenchwoman in a snowbound refugee camp run by the United Nations in Syria, where almost everyone is female because Isis fighters massacred all their menfolk.
The other women suspect her of being an Isis commander herself. Given half a chance, they’ll lynch her or stab her to death – and since the slimy UN aid co-ordinator is fully occupied with coercing hungry refugees into having sex with him, Adilah is left literally fighting to survive.
Moss is the British secret agent, codenamed ‘Imogen’, sent to extract her and bring her to the West, where French and American security services suspect she is involved in masterminding a terror attack. Adilah insists she’s a genuine refugee, and that’s the real question at the core of this thriller: who is she?
And who is ‘Imogen’? Multi-lingual, handy in a knife fight, a natural liar, she also appears to be an idealist.
When she learns Adilah has abandoned a 12-year-old daughter back in France, Imogen looks angry enough for a moment to strangle her with her bare hands.
Moss (above) plays the role of a British secret agent codenamed ‘Imogen’ who does a hoity Kensington
‘A mother should never have to lose her child,’ she fumes – but she denies having children herself.
The obvious comparison is with Killing Eve, another clever and emotionally compelling spy drama about the relationship between a British woman agent and a female terrorist.
But the shifting layers of psychological mystery and the pervading sense of Western values under attack make this perfect fare for anyone who loved the first few seasons of Homeland, the 2012 thriller starring Damian Lewis as a suspected Al Qaeda double agent and Claire Danes as the CIA agent intent on exposing him.
Plus, The Veil has Elisabeth Moss doing a hoity Kensington accent and smiling brightly a lot.
I’m not sure we’ve ever seen her teeth before.
