BBC’s Wolf is the sadistic hit of the summer – but will leave you howling for all the wrong reasons

BBC One’s dark new drama takes a home invasion to terrifying extremes. The brutality would be easier to justify if the series itself wasn’t so messy, writes Louis Chilton

Under seige: Annes Elwy as Lucia Anchor-Ferrers in ‘Wolf' (BBC/Hartswood Films Ltd/Simon Ridgway)

There’s something uniquely terrifying about a home invasion. It’s a crime, yes, but also more than this. If you can’t be safe in your own home, then where on earth can you be? It’s this terror that the new BBC miniseries Wolf strives to harness. Set in the Welsh countryside, the twist-packed six-episode TV show follows the Anchor-Ferrers, a wealthy family who are set upon in their home by two young psychopaths. These men, played by Game of Thrones’ Iwan Rheon and Doctor Who’s Sacha Dhawan, insinuate their way into the property by introducing themselves as police officers named DS Molina and DI Honey. Once in, the duo begin tormenting the family with a succession of sadistic stunts. They tie them up. Assault them. Force the family dog to eat jewellery. And that’s just the beginning.

The series has drawn a mixed response from viewers: some praised the drama, while others condemned the excess. In a positive review of the series, The Independent’s critic Sean O’Grady drew comparisons to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, perhaps cinema’s definitive home invasion film. Like Wolf, Funny Games – both Michael Haneke’s 1997 Austrian original and his 2007 shot-for-shot English-language remake – follows two young men who torture a suburban family. It’s a brutal, unpleasant watch, one that constantly questions the audience’s complicity in its premise. It refuses to cut away or offer respite: at one point, the family manages to overpower the invaders, shooting one of them, only for the other to “rewind” the film and prevent them. It ends with a whimper, not a bang: no justice, no resolution, just the hint of more carnage to come. Wolf steers clear of Funny Games’ formal trickery but still borrows from it liberally. That’s fine, of course – if only the material wasn’t so ridiculous. Rheon’s chummy, somewhat effervescent villain is like a poorly judged parody; Dhawan, playing Bad Cop, is allowed to let much too loose. There is a place for sadism on screen – but if the script is as bad as Wolf’s, it ends up feeling entirely gratuitous. The tone is muddied to the point of total dissonance; the terror becomes almost camp.

Consider a scene at the end of episode two, fittingly titled “Torture”. Dad Oliver (Owen Teale) and daughter Lucia (Annes Elwy) are shepherded into a room by Honey and Molina – these names sound as preposterous spoken aloud as they are written down, I assure you – where they find mum Matilda (Juliet Stevenson) dangling from the ceiling by her legs, like a cow carcass strung up in an abattoir. Matilda’s alive, just about. For how much longer, we’re not sure. Honey (Dhawan) begins preening around the room to the sound of Figaro’s aria from Rossini’s Barber of Seville, brandishing a cutlass. It’s meant to seem arch, but ends up laugh-out-loud ridiculous.

As the scene reaches a sword-swinging crescendo, Honey’s torment is intercut with a separate scene of another character, police detective Jack Caffrey (Ukweli Roach) having sex. (Caffrey is part of Wolf’s other separate-but-obviously-related storyline, which involves a grizzly serial killer, the disappearance of Caffrey’s brother and a nefarious paedophile – yep, it’s a lot.) The juxtaposition gives the scene a sense of frenzy; perhaps we are meant to read some sexual element into the family’s torture. But by cutting away, Wolf undermines its own power and gives the audience an excuse to distance themselves from its horror.

The best and most effective home invasion fiction – Funny Games; David Fincher’s slick thriller Panic Room – often thrives on a sense of claustrophobia. The good guys are trapped in a building with the bad guys; you feel trapped there too. Because Wolf intersperses its home invasion scenario with another, even more convoluted crime plot, you never really get this sense. For a series that is about the supposed randomness of violence, Wolf gets bogged down in mysteries and explanations. The issue may lie with the original source material – Mo Hayder’s 2014 novel upon which the series is based – or with the need to stretch its story over six episodes. But Wolf is unable to sustain the tension needed to justify its violent excess.

By the end of the series, it’s clear that Wolf has no problem being dark. It is probably as grim and morbid a series as you are likely to see on BBC One all year. But to what end? Any purpose – to make us truly consider the arbitrary and devastating nature of this crime, perhaps – is swallowed up by the melodrama. Funny Games grabbed its audience by the lapels, forcing them to reckon with their own agency. “Why are you watching this?” it seemed to ask. Sitting through Wolf, I asked myself the same question – but for very different reasons.

‘Wolf’ is available to stream now on iPlayer