An enigmatic landlord imposes impossible demands on his new tenant, in this gripping adaptation of JP Delaney’s bestselling novel
JP Delaney (one of the pseudonyms used by the prolific author Tony Strong) writes well-paced thrillers with a great hook. Like Salman Rushdie and Fay Weldon, Strong was originally an ad man at Ogilvy & Mather and his books are the kind you can read with half your brain somewhere else (in an airport lounge, hospital waiting room or booster queue) with no harm done. The Girl Before (BBC One) is the first of his Delaney books to be brought to the screen, and it has neither gained nor lost anything in translation. This is not a complaint. Solid storytelling is a great and needed skill, especially at this exhausting time of year and at the end of this particularly exhausting year or two (or three, four or five … ). I mean merely to manage your expectations, so you match material to mood and have as good a time as possible.
The story comprises two alternating timelines. The first (chronologically speaking) involves a young couple, Emma (Jessica Plummer) and Simon (Ben Hardy), who move into One Folgate Street, a beautiful ultra-minimalist, fully automated house, designed and built by owner-landlord and enigmatic architect Edward Monkford (David Oyelowo, unerringly treading the fine line between self-possessed and creepy), in the wake of a traumatic burglary of their own home.
