The Dark review – this gothic crime drama is so icily creepy it’s practically a heatwave antidote

Gothic-lite is a contradiction in terms, I suppose, but it’s undoubtedly what you get from new six-part thriller The Dark. Based on Scottish crime writer GR Halliday’s From the Shadows, it opens with an unseen man carefully punching holes in leather straps, then striding across the Highlands with a naked man’s either very unconscious or very dead body over his shoulder. The arms swing like metronomes marking time that has already, we very much suspect, run out.

So it proves, as the next time we see the body it is via a drone shot that reveals it to have been laid supine on the ground, arms pointing prayerfully above the head in futile supplication. DI Monica Kennedy (Laura Donnelly) is called to investigate and a cold, webby mass of intrigue begins to be spun. When it’s not gloaming it’s dreich – which, with the icy finger of dread that frequently runs up and down the viewer’s spine, makes it the perfect antidote to a heatwave.

Just don’t watch it if you’ve any sons or nephews you are fond of. The corpse turns out to be that of 17-year-old Jason Morgan, the younger brother of a boy who went missing five years ago. DI Kennedy investigated that too. There was gossip that his stepfather Barclay (Emun Elliott) killed the lad, Nichol, she tells her new partner Crawford (Mark Rowley); yet the evidence suggested that he had run away. They break the news of Jason’s death to his parents and it is so sparely done that the awfulness somehow screams louder. His mother, Bethany (Helen Baxendale), cuts an over-large piece of cake for Crawford while Barclay leaves to identify the body and accidentally drops it on the floor. It is the scale of domestic disaster she should be coping with, but everything is wrong.

As the investigation into Jason’s death cranks into gear (relying at times on intuitive leaps that jar with the bleak and careful realism elsewhere), the rest of the players are brought into operation. There is Rob (Aaron McVeigh), a similar age to Jason, who works as a waiter at the local hotel and finds a burner phone one morning taped to the handlebars of his beloved bike. His mother, who recently abandoned him and his father for reasons as yet unspecified, texts him on it, apologising and wanting to meet. I wonder, you wonder, but Rob does not wonder – he just smiles with relief.

Soon DI Kennedy will realise she is on the trail of a serial killer and she and the audience will have to sift through the clues (swallowed stones, drugged teas, animals killed and stuffed) that seem to point to connections between some of the murders and suspected murders, potential red herrings and a growing list of suspects to arrive at the truth. For the latter, the first two episodes alone yield Nichol’s former (possibly overinvolved, possibly worse) social worker Michael (Tunji Kasim), who is now a rattling bag of medications, Rob’s austere father (Cal Macaninch), Barclay, of course (never discount village gossip), the shadowy local rabbit poacher Don (Phil McKee), and a local lad a bit older than the dead and missing. More will doubtless move in and out of focus, keeping us hungry for answers until the delivery of what I suspect will be a fantastically bleak yet satisfying resolution in four more hours’ time.

Alongside the style and confidence that already marks it out from the formulaic ITV herd is Kennedy herself. I didn’t know how ready I was to have a female detective who has her childcare arrangements sorted (a grandma! Who doesn’t even have early dementia! Played by Stella Gonet!) and a backstory that comprises more than the struggle against working-single-mum guilt and a useless husband. Tantalising hints of Kennedy’s past are provided by the local residents she meets and interviews, who seem to remember her pregnancy a few years ago with a strange degree of interest, and by the woman who seems set on returning the child to her father. Which is all of a gothic keeping with the thing, and for once thickens rather than distracts from the main plot.

There are infelicities in The Dark. The aforementioned intuitive leaps, the odd unlikely action (there is no reason, for example, for Kennedy to pick up a certain bouquet of flowers at the hospital when told to, instead of explaining that they are not from her, except for the demands of the narrative) and a very strange, wildly overwritten part for a pathologist, who has to say things like “Dark as the darkest soul” in a thick eastern European accent and then go away again, presumably to try to find out which drama she should have been in instead.

Other than that, it’s great fun. Lean in and let it chill you to the bone.

• TThe Dark aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX