The Virtues review, episode 4: Deeply harrowing, deeply disturbing – and deeply impressive

Given the long trajectory of the main storyline – an abused child Joseph (Stephen Graham) grows up and goes on a quest for the truth – it isn’t that much of a surprise that The Virtues (Channel 4) ends as it does, with a suicide, a murder and an attempted murder. As we see, the sins and hurts of past child abuse always reverberate down the decades, and the abused often turn out to be abusers themselves. That much we know and can prepare for.

What I was not quite ready for was to see a bedridden paedophile putting up quite such a show of defiance directly to his former victim. Joseph finally tracks him down, confronts him with what he did, and looks for any kind of explanation or contrition. None is forthcoming. In the most tense sequence in what has been a wrenching series, Liam Carney is outstanding as the deeply sadistic and callous child molester Damon. It was he who, with his brother, at around the age of 15 or 16 took it in turns to pin down and rape the nine-year-old Joseph.

It is painful to watch as the seedy Damon, half-dressed, smoking a roll-up, on a drip and at first mistaking Joseph for his meals on wheels service, just carries on with his cruelty, taunting him with denials and counter-accusations, picking up where he left off at the care home they shared about three decades previously. There is a crucifix incongruously nailed above Damon’s squalid bed.

Eventually, Joseph convinces Damon he did indeed assault him, by recalling his care home nickname (Nomad – Damon spelt backwards). To this, all Damon can say is: “I thought you were dead.” The disdain is almost violent. The dialogue goes on:

Joseph: “Why did you do that to me?”

Damon: “Why not you? What makes you so special? Didn’t do you any harm, did it?”

It transpires that Damon and his (now dead) brother were abused themselves and serial abusers of the younger boys. They were also not the only paedophiles around this Catholic care home. In his twisted logic, Damon suggests they did little Joseph a favour because, after the double rape, he ran away and ended up in safety, with an auntie in Liverpool – “you should be thanking me”.

We see Joseph quiet coldly make an attempt at strangling the invalid Damon to death, but eventually easing off. You get the clear sense, albeit near-imperceptibly transmitted, that Joseph realises killing Damon – for whom we obviously feel no sympathy even at the hour of his death – wouldn’t change anything, except to give him some spurious feeling of revenge. But it would not, in other words, undo what had been done. Nor would it benefit Craigy (Mark O’Halloran), another survivor of the care home abuse by Damon who naively gave Damon’s address to Joseph. The last we see of the emotionally scarred Craigy is him hanging on the end of a rope (with a reveal that leads us to think at first that it might be Joseph).

Brilliantly directed by Shane Meadows, with writing by Meadows and Jack Thorne, and in the hands of such gifted actors, these scenes are delivered with a rare sort of delicacy and care, every pause and reaction exquisitely timed, the humanity shining through the darkness of the tawdry subject matter, all too poignant.

These are far from the only moving performances. In a parallel, intercut, series of conversations and another assault, we see Joseph’s sister-in-law, the wayward Dinah (Niamh Algar), confront her own mother, Apphia (Aisling Glenhomes), about what happened to the baby boy, Finn, she had had to give up at age 15. Dinah has just discovered Apphia had not only pressured her into giving him up for adoption, but had destroyed letters that Finn has sent to her, and told the social services that Dinah wanted no contact with the child – a huge lie. Like Joseph, Dinah confronts her persecutor with the facts, and encounters similar contempt.

Apphia embodies the kind of strict, prim, moralistic, uptight religious Irish woman of a certain type, possessed of the very child-hating, child-beating mindset that facilitated so much of the abuse we now know happened over so many years. Like Joseph, too, we feel for Dinah, and sympathise when she, in a crime of passion, throttles Apphia, apparently to death. As a result, though, Dinah and we know she will probably go to prison and never see her Finn again. It also puts an end to what might have been a new positive relationship between her and Joseph. Like so much else in the drama it is deeply harrowing, deeply disturbing – and deeply impressive.