What you may have missed in Netflix's Criminal starring David Tennant
When David Tennant's outwardly composed Doctor Fallon has suddenly put his jumper on during another exhaustive round of police interrogation in Netflix's Criminal, it's loaded with significance that viewers are invited to decipher alongside the show's detectives.
Does he feel exposed? Did he put his guard down earlier, and needs to feel protected? Is it a defence mechanism? Could this indicate his innocence?
The immersive crime series – which spans four territories (UK, Spain, Germany and France) – is set in an interrogation suite, occasionally spilling out into an observation room or the police station corridor, which is arguably where the characters reveal their true, unedited selves.
This makes it unique from other popular procedural dramas, which usually begin with police tape around a crime scene, a dead body and forensics procuring evidence.
But in Criminal, every single facial expression of the character under investigation, no matter how subtle, their physical appearance, and what they're wearing (or not wearing), is key to the plot, either to throw viewers off, or to lead them to the conclusion.
If they're pausing to sip water, or fiddling with a pen on the desk, much like a play, the action and props are up for interpretation and integral to the story.
"If we're going to hold on to a shot of David Tennent for two minutes, there's a reason for that," creator and director Jim Field Smith told Digital Spy. "It's down to the quality of the performance, which is meant to make you question: what am I meant to be looking at? I'm meant to be looking at something here, and I know need to figure out what it is.
"Is it the way the chair creaks when he shifts in it? What am I now meant to ascertain, in the same way the cops are?
"The whole story is in that space of the interrogation room, and therefore the twists have to come from something other than finding a piece of evidence, it has to come from human behaviour. The rise of an eyebrow, the change in breathing. These things that seem so small, suddenly become vast in the show.
"These choices that they make have to be deliberate, and they might be deliberate because we're trying to steer you down a red herring path, or they might be deliberate because the show is quite forensic. If there's a button undone, there's a reason for that. it was fun being able to embrace that."
On Tennant's character appearing in a scene with a jumper on over his shirt, show-runner George Kay explained: "For example, whether someone takes their jumper off, it's, 'Why have they taken their jumper off?' It's not just to show a jump in time. Are they getting hot and why are they getting hot, are they flustered? When Tennant puts his jumper on, he's started to feel more protected. It's little small things [that have huge implications]."
Doctor Fallon's accent is noticeably clipped, and sounds upper-middle class, which Kay says is "inviting your prejudice". "What he's wearing, what he sounds like, is he sitting forward in his seat..."
Fallon is accused of murdering his teenage stepdaughter, which he denies throughout the fraught 24-hour investigation. We see the detectives announcing their verdict from the comfort of the observation room while he's being interviewed, which entices viewers to do the same at home.
In episode two, Hayley Atwell's character is being questioned over the death of her sister's partner. The show-runners spoke about how Atwell, much like they were, was fixated on getting her character's look just right, as how she looks on the outside is part of who she is, and where she's come from.
"Atwell must have shown us 13 different tracksuit tops, and she made sure to get exactly the right style of nails done, and the rings and the earrings she's wearing, and we suggested she kept her hair pink," Smith recalled.
Again, the visual side encourages the viewers to try ascertain the person's character and temperament – and maybe their class and background – which could also ignite an unconscious bias or judgement towards them. This in turn could impact whether we believe them to be guilty or innocent.
"It's just the details that in another drama might be slightly less important, but in ours its the whole ballgame," Smith concluded.
The cast also includes Katherine Kelly, Rochenda Sandall, Lee Ingleby, Nicholas Pinnock, Mark Stanley, and Shubham Saraf.
Criminal is available to stream on Netflix now.
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