‘The Dark’ Season 1 Review: A Highland Manhunt That Trades Shock for Slow-Burning Dread

There is a particular kind of British crime drama that leans on fog, silence, and a haunted lead detective to do the heavy lifting, and ‘The Dark’ knows exactly which tradition it belongs to. The six part ITV series drops Laura Donnelly into the Scottish Highlands as DI Monica Kennedy, called out to investigate a young man’s body left deliberately staged in the wilderness. It is adapted from GR Halliday’s novel and arrives with the kind of quiet confidence that suggests everyone involved understood the assignment.

The premise sounds familiar on paper, a predator loose in a close knit community, a detective drawn into secrets nobody wanted dug up. What keeps ‘The Dark’ from feeling like a rerun is the way it treats that setup as a starting point rather than the whole show. Monica quickly realizes the victim’s older brother vanished years earlier, and that discovery reshapes the investigation into something colder and more personal than a straightforward hunt for a killer.

Donnelly is the reason this all works as well as it does. She plays Monica with a controlled, flinty intelligence that never tips into the exhausted detective clichés this genre usually reaches for. She is guarded without ever going blank, and there is a real sense that her composure costs her something rather than existing as a personality trait she was simply born with. It is a performance built on restraint, and restraint is a much harder thing to pull off convincingly than a breakdown scene.

Mark Rowley matches her well as DC Connor Crawford, bringing an instinctive warmth to a role that could have been reduced to nothing more than a sounding board for the lead.

Their partnership develops through small moments of earned trust rather than the forced friction so many procedurals mistake for chemistry, and it becomes one of the show’s steadier pleasures across the six episodes. Helen Baxendale, playing a mother whose missing son threads through the wider case, brings a raw exhaustion to her scenes that never tips into melodrama.

The Scottish wilderness itself does more narrative work than location shooting usually manages. Empty roads, isolated farm buildings, and long stretches of woodland are not simply pretty backdrops here, they actively contribute to the sense that this community is exposed and hard to protect. The weather feels like a character with its own agenda, cutting across conversations and pressing in on every exterior scene, and the show is smart enough to let that atmosphere build dread instead of just decorating the frame.

Donnelly has said she was drawn to the project because it prioritizes character over gore, telling the Royal Television Society that the emotional relationships mattered more to her than the mechanics of the crime itself. That instinct shows up clearly onscreen, since the supporting cast reads less like a lineup of red herrings and more like people whose lives were already messy before Monica’s investigation arrived on their doorstep.

Where the series occasionally stumbles is pacing. Six episodes is a lot of runway for a mystery that reveals its hand gradually, and there are stretches where the show seems more interested in mood than momentum, testing patience before the plot mechanics catch back up. Viewers hunting for a twisty, plot forward thriller may find themselves waiting a beat too long between real developments, even as the atmosphere stays consistently strong.

Still, what ‘The Dark’ gets right outweighs what it gets cautious about. It resists the genre’s worst impulse toward gratuitous violence against women, instead building its horror out of grief, guilt, and the particular menace of a landscape that swallows people whole. Donnelly anchors the whole thing with a performance sturdy enough to make the slower stretches worth sitting through.

Taken as a whole season, this is a confident, atmospheric crime drama that trusts its actors and its setting more than it trusts shock value, and it mostly earns that trust. I am landing on 8 out of 10, a series that knows exactly what kind of tension it wants to build and rarely rushes to get there.

Have you watched ‘The Dark’ yet, and does Monica Kennedy earn a place among your favorite TV detectives? Let me know in the comments.