This two-part TV production was going along quite well, I thought, heading for an anticipated showdown between Francesca Annis's mother-in-law from hell and her would-be victim Lucy Griffith and also one really good twist surely just around the corner waiting to finish it off neatly. Instead, we get a blink-and-you-miss-it denouement with Annis at last getting her just desserts and Griffith turning the tables on her even after the wicked witch is dead, but it was an ending without surprise or tension and for me let down what had been reasonably effectively built up till then.
Not that there weren't other faults too, for example, Annis's husband Tim Pigot-Smith's character is too ambiguous. In episode 1 you're convinced he's in cahoots with his wife's nefarious and frankly unfathomable wish to appropriate Griffith's child for herself but in the second show, he's revealed to be innocent and in fact exposes, even if unwittingly, some of Annis's devious plans. There's also a male friend of Griffith who you think is going to play a bigger part than he does and there's also an obscure red-herring too in the references to Annis's other daughter, who now lives aboard and obviously has a testy relationship with her mother, presumably because she wasn't a boy.
There were no genuinely scary moments, the only fairly mundane attempt being Annis's silly dressing up as Griffith's late mother, in full 60's hippy gear, to supposedly convince her victim she's lost her mind, but it maintained a decent head of steam up until that anti-climactic finish which let it down.
The acting by the four leads is all good and a chilly if not chilling atmosphere is pretty well conveyed from the start. Again I felt a bit more menace could have been conveyed in the sets for the houses themselves especially given the series title, after all.
