Fractures open up in a tight knit northern community following a series of strange and unnatural crimes.

ITV has long been known for its weekday crime dramas – sometimes procedural, sometimes more domestic in their setting – and the casual viewer can be forgiven for assuming any new offering will be more of the same. So it is particularly refreshing to see the network adding a bit of horror tropery to their primetime fare.

Andrew Buchan – one of those really rather good British telly actors you see in everything but probably would struggle to name (best known for Garrow’s Law and Broadchurch) – makes an impressive screenwriting debut in what could be described as ‘Son of Happy Valley’ with added eco and folk-horror vibes, but stopping short of going the full League of Gentlemen.

As with Sally Wainwright’s much loved Peak District police procedural, we are somewhere in the vicinity of Todmorden where Riya (Wunmi Mosaku) plays a relocated Met detective trying (and largely failing) to motivate the lackadaisical local force into taking a sequence of ever more anomalous events seriously. To be fair, the place is pretty odd to start with (think Twin Peaks with chips and gravy) so she shouldn’t be all that surprised that her colleagues aren’t overly excited by mysteriously eviscerated stags, visitors who disappear without paying for their B&B accommodation, or secretive young women coughing up oily black goo.

Add to the mix a haunted David Threlfall as the terrified night watchman Jim Bracknell, and his attacker Eddie Wells (Barry Sloane) released early from prison, unsettling an already unsettled community, and distinctly unwelcome in his own family. Also woven into the tapestry we have Nico Millalegro as Kane, a sort of Igor to Daniel Ryan’s Derek Jackson who owns Jumbo Breads and is clearly up to crusty batches of no good in the local bakery’s delivery vans.

There’s a handful of other characters too, and credit to Buchan, they are introduced with clarity and economy, making for an absorbing and entertaining watch. Whether the outcome will prove to be anything paranormal at all we are yet to discover, but the genre devices are effectively deployed balancing humour with nicely pitched undercurrents of something far darker.

Verdict: Passenger is a refreshing departure for ITV primetime, hugely entertaining and well executed, and I’m looking forward to seeing whether it fulfils the promise of its opening episodes. 8/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com