Dark Heart, episode 1, review: ITV's new drama is solid pulpy fun

Chris Lang’s Unforgotten was a thriller caked in the grit and moral ambivalence of the real world. His new six-part procedural Dark Heart (ITV) is something else entirely – a heightened revenge caper that casts London as a neverland of sodium-lit underpasses and tobacco-stained antechambers. It’s atmospheric and quietly riotous – but there is also a whiff of the experimental side-project about it. Lang is clearly eager to exit his comfort zone and, it is tempting to conclude, jolt his audience out of theirs’ too.

Tom Riley gives good stubble as troubled detective Will Wagstaffe. He drinks too much, sulks in the abandoned house of his dead parents and throws silent daggers at his sister’s (Charlotte Riley) ne’er-do-well new boyfriend, whose unsuitability is signalled by his Seann Walsh-style cascade of man-curls.

Wagstaffe’s deportment isn’t completely explained by the fact Dark Heart is the sort of series in which the hero is invariably a moody enigma. Sixteen years ago, his mother and father were brutally slain, their killer never apprehended. The anniversary of their deaths is looming, marking the first time in Will’s life that he will have been around longer without his parents than with them. He copes by mooching about in a hoodie while listening to depressing music – perhaps he’s obtained an early cut of Westlife’s comeback single – on oversized headphones.

As if his unhappy family circumstances aren’t enough to brood over, Wee Will Woebegone is forced to cancel his holidays in order to investigate a sequence of enthusiastically sadistic vigilante killings of justice-evading paedophiles. The first victim (Mark Fleischmann) is a teetotal force-fed a bottle of whiskey and then tortured. The second, a predatory barrister (Nicholas Asbury), has an unhappy encounter with a blow torch.

Wagstaffe and his partner Josie (Anjli Mohindra) soon learn of a third paedophile, targeted some years ago after getting off scot-free. The victim’s dad (Robert Hands) took the fall for the attack but when Wagstaffe visits the prison the supposed perpetrator is clearly far too wimpy to have committed the crime. Who is he covering for?

Clichés run thick and fast in the first half of a pilot initially broadcast in 2016 on ITV Encore (and now expanded into a full series). The wife of the first molester (Simone Kirby) is a pinch-faced chip shop employee self-medicating with booze. The barrister’s victim is estranged from her prostitute mum (who reveals that she loves her daughter, despite being a prostitute mum).

Dark Heart, adapted from Adam Creed's DI Wagstaffe novels, is solid pulpy fun. Everyone huffs about speaking in terse gumshoe cadences and there’s a comic-book quality to the vigilante, who wears a scary knitted mask and is shot through the grungy brown filter of a Nine Inch Nails video. With Lang’s own Unforgotten and the BBC’s adaptation of JK Rowling’s Robert Galbraith novels, there has been a push recently to make crime procedurals more grounded. Dark Heart resists this trend and is conspicuously at ease in its ridiculousness.

If only Wagstaffe amounted to more than a checklist of angsty sleuth stereotypes. His relationship with his sister feels like a writers’ room contrivance and his on-off girlfriend Sylvie (Miranda Raison) is, in episode one at least, as threadbare as a rug in a landfill. But the ambience is deliciously intense and it’s cheering to see a writer as established as Lang trying something different (even if his idea of different is David Fincher circa Seven). Dark Heart won’t be to all tastes and some devotees of Unforgotten may well loathe every grisly second. But those who like their pulp fiction served straight and without any knowing winks will lap it up.