It’s amazing how much fantasy—a tool of survival and self-preservation—can betray a person after too long spent in that false world. Landscapers is very much a series about such false worlds initially set up as one’s haven ultimately becoming their undoing when the “real” world inevitably starts to close in. Starts to seep through the cracks of that carefully curated invention. Created by Ed Sinclair (in his first major moment in building a credible filmography), the four-episode narrative imaginatively rehashes the story behind the 1998 murders of the elderly William and Patricia Wycherley in Nottinghamshire, specifically Mansfield.
Alas, no one was aware that the two were even dead until fourteen years later, when the couple’s son-in-law, Christopher Edwards (David Thewlis), felt desperate enough to contact his stepmother to ask for some much-needed financial aid. Long after the murders, Christopher and his “fragile” (that’s the word oft-repeated to describe her throughout Landscapers) wife, Susan (Olivia Colman), had continued to live in the UK, but when a notice arrived in the post from the Department for Work and Pensions asking to have a meeting with William (who would have been coming up on one hundred years old, hence the suspicion on the government’s part), the two fled to Lille, France in a panic. But Landscapers begins in the UK, with director Will Sharpe indicating from the outset that these two “dreamers” had been so infected by Hollywood (“Hollywood infected your brain,” as MARINA once knowingly said) that everything, to them, has the potential to be turned into a movie. With their flair for the cinematic, particularly as it pertains to Old Hollywood, we thus open on a black and white scene where an unseen director calls “action!” as fake rain falls near a Phoenix Park-bound tram in Nottingham. Susan’s lawyer, Douglas Hylton (Dipo Ola), runs through the square in a hurry as he takes a call from her while she’s in the police station. Yammering on in her way, Douglas tries to keep her from saying anything until he actually arrives and he’s officially her legal representative in the case.
It is after this that we go back to those end days in Lille, where Susan is still happily spending what little cash they have left on memorabilia. In fact, she’s already become a regular at a local shop, where the proprietor entices her with a second-release Belgian poster of High Noon (Le train stifflera trois fois) starring Gary Cooper, her and Chris’ favorite (well, apart from Gérard Depardieu… yes, one of many pop culture oddities of Landscapers that Sinclair incorporates brilliantly). Sifting through her array of labeled credit cards, she tosses one out to pay for the poster. It’s our first glimpse at her total lack of self-control when it comes to spending—and yes, ironically, Chris Edwards was a credit controller in real life. Which is perhaps why he thought he could play roulette so easily with their borrowed funds, as though he had some arcane knowledge of how to game the system. Though not enough to keep him from still trying to find work in his métier in France. But the English have never been adept at speaking other languages, least of all French, and the comprehension deficit proves to make the couple desperate.
Susan, however, would never feel desperate enough to contact anyone and tell them the truth about what they did. The actual details of which we’ll likely never know for certain as both parties come across as entirely delusional… in keeping with Pete’s (David Strathairn) warning in Nightmare Alley to Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) of “shuteye”: a.k.a. “when a man believes his own lies, starts believing that he has the power, he’s got shuteye. Because now he believes it’s all true. And people get hurt.” In this scenario, not just the Wycherleys, but Chris and Susan themselves. For there is nothing more painful to two people so interconnected than to be separated as they are thanks to the division of male and female inmates.
At the same time, apparently there was nothing more painful for either of them than not spending excessive amounts of money on collector’s items. Because yes, the motive for killing Susan’s parents, in the end, was to fund their mutual obsession with collecting overpriced Hollywood memorabilia. Granted, in the series, Sinclair and Sharpe (who co-wrote the final two episodes) make Susan look much guiltier of that obsession than Chris. Call it coincidence, or ingrained misogyny, but whatever the case, Susan becomes the key focus of how building up a false world to protect yourself results in insanely self-destructive behavior.
Sharpe, like Sinclair, is using Landscapers to buttress a burgeoning career that also includes the recent direction of The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. Sharpe’s nuance when it comes to dark narratives was also begat with the 2016 series, Flowers, once again starring Olivia Colman. It’s clear the two must work well together, for she is in top form as Susan. A woman who has found her counterpart in Chris thanks to the wonders of a dating agency that showcases 1) how awkward both of them are and 2) how much they love Old Hollywood. Maybe it’s because, through these films, Chris and Susan can vicariously live out the roles they wish they could play in real life. He the protector and she the protected. As Chris’ stepmother, Tabitha (Kathryn Hunter), remarks, “They both just disappeared into their own world.” “How do you mean?” asks Emma Lancing (Kate O’Flynn), the deadpan police constable put on the case. Tabitha replies, “Well they’re neither of them built for this one, are they?”
And where do people like that retreat to? Why, the movies of course. After all, these were ilk of a different era, long before streaming or the “Golden Age of TV” ever arrived. They want to rely on cinema the same way Cecilia (Mia Farrow) from The Purple Rose of Cairo did—as an escape so effective it could feel as though one is actually living out the same narrative. Even one as far-fetched as a Gary Cooper Western. But Chris’ own identification with Cooper’s characters is because, as Tabitha, puts it, “He’s always trying to save someone.” The difference? “He never manages to do it.”
That’s certainly true for his beloved Susan, who needed so badly to place all her faith in Chris being her sole chance for salvation. From her oppressive parents, her dreary life, her overall sense of “stuckness.” But Chris is no Gary C. and, in fact, he instead looks a lot like Tony Hale on the Landscapers promo poster.
Colman’s “subtle” neediness is in direct opposition to her recent role as “the mother” in The Lost Daughter. In contrast to what she offers in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s debut, she instead provides us with the abandoned, neglected and berated daughter figure in Landscapers. Except it’s actually worse that Susan’s parents didn’t choose to full-stop physically abandon her the way Leda Caruso does to her own children in The Lost Daughter. Because then maybe Susan wouldn’t have felt the need to withdraw so fully into an internal world for the sake of self-protection. And with that withdrawal into a fantasy land where she felt safe and loved also existed the celluloid realm—land of roguish heroes and damsels in distress…and where things always work out in the final act. Well, in Old Hollywood movies anyway.
As the emotional toll of the police interrogation and then the trial intensifies, Susan starts to register that maybe everything is all her fault, that Chris only stuck around for her sake. So it is that she tells him, “You see, I never cared about being shut out of the real world because I never felt like I was allowed to arrive here in the first place. I’m not here anyway, am I? So what’s the difference? What’s the difference between here and somewhere else in my head? But I see it now, that it was different for you. You had a place in that world, and then you met me.” But Chris sweetly replies, “I never felt like I had to leave the real world behind to be with you, Susan. If anything, you are the person who made the world feel real to me.” Indeed, Bonnie and Clyde could never be made to come across so sympathetically.
There is a fantastical moment—one of many throughout the series—when a projected landscape backdrop comes to its final frame and fades to black, but the two keep pretending to ride on their horse off into the sunset. There is something to be said for this as it’s clear that no amount of reality could ever get in between their love. Maybe not even the reality of two separate jail cells. Or being in a jail cell at all. And, in this way, Landscapers not only gives the Lizzie Borden legend a bit of competition, but also manages to romanticize a couple so wrapped up in their own self-deceptions that they can forget the rest of the world altogether. Only occasionally flickering in and out like an old movie projector when a murder charge comes along.
