Happy Now?

This BBC Films production is a real oddball. Welsh coastal town Pen Y Wig (twinned with 3 Mile Island) is rocked by the killing of a local beauty queen Jenny. Joe (Coyle) and Marcus (Considine) fearfully cover up what started out as an accident, and the homeless Tin Man (Om Puri) is convicted of murder. Fourteen years later the Tin Man gets out of prison just as Marcus' electoral campaign is threatened by the unsettling appearance of Jenny's exact double, Nikki (Rossum). Oh, and there's a new sheriff in town, Gruffudd's handsome but disgraced cop Max. Jam-packed with good actors - Robert Pugh, Susan Lynch - and frankly overloaded with eccentricities like Max's fondness for TV's Bonanza, or the themed hotel presided over by a prone Alison Steadman in a giant metal lung, this never really hits a convincing, authoritative tone. Meanwhile the murder mystery is strictly potboiler.