If you’re a UK-based lover of serial killer investigations, head to the BBC iPlayer where you can now watch Ragdoll. The programme is instantly fascinating to us here on Crime Fiction Lover as it’s based on the novel of the same name by Daniel Cole. We reviewed the book when it came out in 2017 and DeathBecomesHer gave it five stars with one or two extra thumbs ups.
Watch the trailer…
This show has actually been around for a while. It was aired on AMC+ in the US and Alibi in the UK in 2021. Now, the iPlayer will give it a much wider audience.
As with most serial killer thrillers, the set-up is everything. How horrifying can the crime scene look? How gut-wrenching the corpse? How demented the killer’s MO? On that count, both in print and in the show, Ragdoll passes with first class honours.
We’re in Deptford, London. The body that DS Nathan Rose (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) examines in the darkened apartment isn’t actually one body. “The right leg belongs to a black male, the left leg to a caucasian female, the right arm to an East Asian female, the left arm to a caucasian male, a caucasian male torso and a caucasian male head,” lists DC Edmunds.
It’s the head that matters, though. This sewn-on noggin belongs to Mark Hooper, the serial killer Rose attacked in a crowded courtroom after the prosecution case fell apart. Rose went on to have a nervous breakdown. Hooper went on to kill again, but was apprehended and imprisoned. So why is his head attached to this… artwork?
For this horrific creation does resemble a renaissance sculpture. When Rose opens the curtains, the light falls on it in high contrast to create that chiaroscuro effect. Indeed, the stylish application of light and shadow is an interesting element of the cinematography throughout the TV adaptation.
Rose is working for DI Emily Baxter (Thalissa Teixeira), who seems numbed by the violence of the city and keeps her emotions at arm’s length. She’s been supporting Rose, and was his DS before he went to a facility for treatment. Now their roles are reversed. The third detective is DC Lake Edmunds (Lucy Hale), a young American woman with a right-on agenda who comes across a little like Lisa Simpson, a fact signposted in the dialogue. She’s sharp, but rubs her colleagues the wrong way.
Locating the six bodies with missing appendages would seem to be the big challenge facing Baxter and Rose. It turns out that Hooper died in prison and his body’s in the morgue. Our killer has broken in and removed the head… What about the other five?
They won’t have time for that, because a typewritten note with a doodle of the killer’s sculpture arrives on Rose’s desk at the Met. There are six names, beginning with the mayor of London and ending with Nathan Rose himself. Immediately, the police put a protection detail on the mayor, a Boris Johnson-style populist played by crime show veteran Phil Davis.
But all of this seems to link back to Rose’s time in the mental hospital. There, he met an inmate called Joel who told him about Faust, an almost mythical man who will kill anyone he’s asked to. The only condition is that the person asking is next. Did Rose set this in motion by contacting Faust? Well, that’s what we’ll find out across six 45-minute episodes.
Phew! That is quite the set-up, so you can see why Daniel Cole’s novel received such a rave review. What a brilliant debut. Things are a little different in the show. In the book, Mark ‘The Cremation Man’ Hooper is called Naguib Khalid. DS Nathan Rose, is an adaptation of Daniel Cole’s lead detective William Oliver Layton-Fawkes – AKA Wolf. He’s very much the glue that holds the book together. Similarly, the show is woven around Rose, his breakdown and the new serial killer’s obsession with him.
There is a lot to like about Ragdoll on screen. As mentioned, the cinematography is beautiful and unsettling in equal measure. Lots of little visual motifs, chops and edits, smart intro graphics and unusual props. The CRT television in the mental hospital, for example, takes us back decades. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest comes to mind. Rose and Baxter have a weird but interesting connection.
The dialogue, on the other hand, is a lot lighter than the visual tone. The humour is smart-ass, verging on silly, rather than dark. Lake Edmunds’s caricatured woke-ness is laid on too thick. The humour is obviously deliberate as the subject matter is so dark, with violence and stomach-churning gore. The trouble is, it can jar you out of the story. The concept is similar to Se7en, perhaps the tone should have been as well? Online reviews have labelled it Marmite. You either love it or hate it.
The question is: will the concept that drives the story, and the creativity across the production, be enough to pull you through? For me, while the viewing experience is sometimes uneven, the answer is still yes. I’ve started and I’ll give the series more time. IMDb users have given it 5.8/10, while Rotten Tomatoes goes much higher at 92 per cent. But you be the judge… Let us know what you think in the comments.
I really enjoyed it and raced through it. I liked the smarty-pants quips, though sometimes they did seem like they were from a different show. The look, and sound, really worked for me, but the mad sax was sometimes jarring! A cracking yarn with a splendid cast.