Landscapers: Olivia Colman and David Thewlis Shine as a Murderous Couple Trying to Rewrite Their Lives

In the new HBO miniseries Landscapers, Susan (Olivia Colman) and Christopher (David Thewlis) are a bland, boring English couple residing in France. They have problems—she can’t stop buying art that they can’t afford and he can’t seem to get a job in order to pay off their mounting debt—but they love each other and seem to love their expat life, even when struggling to speak French. But in a moment of stress while on the phone with his stepmother, Christopher breaks and confesses the couple’s long-held secret: they’ve murdered Susan’s parents and buried them in the backyard. What’s more is that they did it 15 years ago. What follows is an interrogation—not only into these murderous claims, but into their psyches and their relationship as two deeply damaged people.

Based on a real couple who have maintained their innocence for all these years, Landscapers is far from a typical true crime drama. The four episode series is experimental in nature, unraveling and investigating these people in sequences that veer into fable, mixing truth with fantasy. Hailing from Ed Sinclair and Will Sharpe, the show is less interested in telling its story through a traditional crime genre lens and instead chooses to center it with romance at its heart.

Its production setup is also curiously reminiscent of HBO’s Scenes from a Marriage remake from earlier this year, where each episode began with a peek behind the curtains, following the actors as they arrived on set and walked to their mark before the director shouted, “rolling!” That method reminded viewers that the following hour was purely fictional before diving into the deep end of emotional storytelling.

In Landscapers, there is a similar suspension of reality. The series not only begins with a title card that announces “This is a true story” before the word “true” disappears, but it also constructs a behind-the-scenes type of narrative as Susan and Christopher begin to explain what happened on that fateful weekend, as well as their history as individuals and as a couple. And yet, in Landscapers, we aren’t being reminded that we are watching a piece of fiction; in real life, the couple’s motives were ultimately greedy (they drained her parents’ bank account in favor of traveling and buying celebrity memorabilia). Here, we’re watching as the main characters descend into stories of their own, casting themselves in the films they star in inside their heads. Susan and Christopher are grasping for some semblance of understanding of their predicament and of their lives and choose to do so via stylized frames that resemble French actor Gerard Depardieu’s films that the couple loves.