Review: Marchlands

Has anyone else seen or heard of this? It aired back in 2011, and it was on a whim that I picked up the DVD at the local library. I watched all five episodes in one go (which took me half the night, but never mind) and though I wasn't completely blown away, it did raise several interesting questions about what constitutes a ghost story.

The selling point of Marchlands is that it's a ghost story spanning three different families across three different periods: the Sixties, the Eighties, and the present day. All the action takes place in the same house, and the set designers clearly had a great time capturing the décor, fashion, technology and general atmosphere of each period. But just as each of the three stories intertwine with each other, so too does the juxtaposition of the ghostly occurrences merge with the more mundane family dramas.

In 1960 Ruth Bowen is still grief-stricken over the accidental drowning of her daughter Alice. Though the police have deemed it an accident, there are several inconsistencies that make Ruth think something in particular led to her death. Why did her obedient daughter run away? And where's her duffel coat and crucifix?

Not helping matters is that she's stuck in a claustrophobic house environment that she has to share with her in-laws. Her husband's father is sympathetic enough, but her mother-in-law is a textbook case of an Obnoxious In-Law.

In 1987 married couple Eddie and Helen Maynard move into Marchlands with their two children: surly teenager Scott and precocious daughter Amy. The latter is soon raising eyebrows with her talk of an "imaginary friend" called Alice, and after several unexplained occurrences around the house, the Maynards grow concerned that she has some kind of mental disorder.

Finally, Mark Ashburn and his pregnant partner Nisha Parekh are the last to arrive in 2010, only for Nisha to start uncovering clues that the place was once inhabited by a little girl called Alice.

It's a show that is most interested in its innovative central premise: of three families living in one house across three different time periods. The cast/crew clearly had a lot of fun in capturing the social mores and fashions of each time, as well as the profound changes that took place over just a few decades. Most of its intrigue comes from the reappearance of supporting characters across all three strands of the plot (obviously played by different actors of varying ages) and how they can add fresh – or old – insight into what really happened when Alice died.

The cast is pretty rock-solid, with the most familiar faces being Jodie Whittaker as Ruth Bowen (she seems to be making a career out of playing bereaved mothers, as she also plays Beth Lattimer on Broadchurch), Alex Kingston (River Song obviously, who in a fun move is playing the mother of the little actress who played her younger self on Doctor Who) and Elliot Cowen (currently starring as Lorenzo de Medici on Da Vinci's Demons).

But as a ghost story, it's really quite slight. Heck, Mark and Nisha barely even notice they're being haunted until well into the fourth episode, and though I have a fairly low threshold when it comes to getting spooked, there was really nothing here that had me gnawing my fingernails – and I slept like a baby afterwards.

It focuses just as much on domestic affairs as it does on the ghostly aspect of the story – on bereavement, strained marriages, old love affairs, the generational gap, the worries of parenthood – as it does on little Alice's hauntings. But because all this is stretched over three families, in a plot that is constantly switching from one to the other, it's a little hard to settle down for long on one particular character and invest in their specific problems.

(And as entertaining as the Eighties storyline is, the fact that it has no real bearing on how the ghost story is resolved means it ultimately feels a little superfluous).

By the time we finally figure out what truly happened on the day Alice died – well, for me at least it comes as a bit of an anti-climax. I don't want to give too much away, but suffice to say that although the truth finally brings Ruth the closure she needs, it also has no real bearing on the police investigation or the haunting that followed.

It's also not a particularly difficult "twist" to work out. There's a trope called The Law of Conservation of Detail, which points out that any seemingly purposeless scene or character or detail in a story will register as highly significant in a viewer's mind simply because of its innocuousness. Obviously the story isn't going to bother introducing something unless it proves to be important later on.

As such, the frequent inclusion of a side-character who has absolutely no bearing on what's happening at Marchlands will raise the red flags of any discerning viewer, simply because there's no other reason for her to be present at all.

All in all, Marchlands is an entertaining drama with a keen eye for capturing the details of each period, but I hesitate to really call it a ghost story. No doubt the publicity train toted it as "an old fashioned ghost story" with plenty of "twists and turns" – but, it's really not. If anything, poor dead Alice is just a device used to exacerbate the family dramas.

It probably deserves at least two watches, just to catch all the clues and foreshadowing strewn throughout, but... well, a ghost story without much of a ghost and without much of a mystery is definitely something of an oddity!