Based on a Swedish series, this dire Channel 4 police drama boasts downright woeful acting – and a script that seems cobbled together via Google Translate
Channel 4’s new drama Before We Die is based on a Swedish series of the same name. It figures: viewing it felt exactly like watching something where all the important things had been lost in translation.
A pace that might perhaps have fostered a sense of dread in the original here tips over into simple slowness. The story – shifted from Stockholm to Bristol – follows senior police detective Hannah Laing (Lesley Sharp). Hannah is being forced to do a desk job in the hope that it will encourage her to retire and make way for new blood, a story that unfolds no more than steadily. She is on bad terms with her son, Christian (Patrick Gibson), because, two years before the story proper begins, she had him arrested for drug dealing during a nightclub raid. (To be fair, she thought he would get a suspended sentence rather than the prison term he ended up serving. We’ve all been there with our recalcitrant teens.)
