The Listeners on BBC One review: Rebecca Hall is a revelation as a woman pushed to the brink by 'the Hum'

‘The Hum’, a debased dependable heard by a prime fewer people, is an unexplained improvement that has been reported successful assorted locations since the Seventies and formed the ground for writer Jordan Tannahill’s 2021 caller The Listeners. Now the BBC has adated the publication into a four-part miniseries starring Rebecca Hall, relocating it from small-town America to mediate England, wherever religion and conspiracy are a antithetic kettle of fish.

Claire Kutty (Hall) is simply a secondary schoolhouse teacher driven to the borderline of a tense breakdown by a strange, debased rumbling sound that seemingly lone she tin hear. Insomnia and nosebleeds plague her.

Her bemused household promote her to question a aesculapian explanation, but she comes up against an all-to-real dismissiveness of women’s wellness concerns from the aesculapian profession. Could it beryllium menopause? Stress? Perimenopause, perhaps? Infuriated, she demands much tests, each inconclusive. Her hubby starts sleeping successful the spare room. Headphones don’t marque a dent successful it.

An exhausted Claire finds retired that recalcitrant pupil Kyle (Ollie West) tin besides perceive the Hum and joins him connected a clandestine hunt for the source, crossing nonrecreational lines retired of desperation for an explanation.

And it turns retired they are not alone. A enactment radical of different “Listeners” is gathering adjacent but what starts arsenic an AA-style sharing ellipse rapidly spills into pseudoscience astir lightning followed by aggravated meditation sessions. Is this community, oregon a cult?

The archetypal occurrence successful peculiar is afloat of delicious fearfulness tropes, underscored by a retro reddish rubric paper consecutive retired of Eighties slasher films. With her abbreviated flicky pixie chopped and vintage nightgown collection, Hall’s Claire evokes Mia Farrow successful Rosemary’s Baby. She’s a magnetic modern gothic heroine, creeping astir her sterile caller physique location astatine night, falling down net rabbit holes, taking ominous showers. Blood drips from her chemoreceptor constantly. We ever spot her framed done reflective glass.

Later, it tips towards the psychedelic and subject fiction, arsenic Claire’s assemblage turns connected her and insomnia drives her to terrifying hallucinatory episodes. But manager Janicza Bravo is ever slyly suggesting mundane explanations for The Hum, upwind turbines and energy pylons looming successful the distance. And who truly are the Listeners?

Yet, this is not a enigma to beryllium solved truthful overmuch arsenic a survey of however acold a idiosyncratic tin beryllium pushed earlier they drawback – oregon drift earlier they are radicalised.

Hall is simply a revelation, capable to pass unease oregon vexation with the quirk of her eyebrows. As an assemblage surrogate, Claire is cannily written, astatine erstwhile wholly susceptible but with a wise-cracking streak of humour and a earthy skepticism.

She tries everything – research, nonrecreational help, an alternate explanation. A fictional quality playing by mean rules successful a perchance supernatural concern brings to caput China Miéville’s perfectly nasty abbreviated fearfulness communicative Säcken. As the walls adjacent in, determination is nary mode retired for Claire but through.

Sometimes the publication over-extends itself to propulsion her towards isolation and destruction. Her seemingly bully feline hubby Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah) is unsympathetic to the constituent of implausibility, weirdly speedy to presume the worst. Her erstwhile person turns cruel.

Ashley (Mia Tharia), her daughter, is much believably mercurial arsenic she sits her exams and prepares to modulation from schoolhouse to university. Tharia and West, the youngest successful the cast, could bargain a country from anyone but Hall.

Shot, unusually, connected film, it has the prime of a lucid dream, but 1 that mightiness springiness you nightmares. The Listeners is champion watched unsocial with headphones, each the amended to freak yourself retired with the soundtrack. The Hum realised present is not a elemental monotone but an undulating premix of rising tones, choral vocalisations, guttural utterings. You mightiness commencement to wonderment if you tin perceive it, too.

The Listeners is connected BBC One and iPlayer from November 19