The Virtues, episode two review: A brutal, beautiful drama that reveals its secrets with uneasy slowness

Shane Meadows continues to display his capacity for compassion as his broken hero travels to Ireland in search of answers

Stephen Graham plays Joseph with a subjugated pathos that is at once compelling and repellent (Channel 4/Dean Rogers)

Nobody gets uncomfortable truths out into the open quite like children. “How come you’re not dead, like mam said?” Anna’s son asks his mother’s long-lost brother Joseph, in the second episode of The Virtues (Channel 4). “Did you get a new mam and dad, like mam did?” her daughter chimes in. “Did they get, like, first pick or something?” The queries keep coming, dumped by the children onto their uncle’s lap with exquisite tactlessness. They are simple questions – to the kids at least. But in Shane Meadows’s brutal yet beautiful drama, inspired by a traumatic event from his own childhood, there are no simple answers.

Joseph (Stephen Graham) spent the first half of last week’s episode barely holding it together around his young son, whose mother (a benevolent ex, not a bitter one) was moving him to Australia with her new partner. After their departure, he unravelled catastrophically, drinking himself into oblivion before waking up with a bloody head, in a pool of his own vomit.

Now – for reasons Meadows reveals with uneasy slowness, dropping clues, in the form of VHS-style flashbacks, to a long-suppressed childhood trauma – he has crossed the Irish sea to Belfast. With no money for a taxi, thanks to an infuriating jobsworth at the ferry company (“I hope your mum loves you,” were Joseph’s parting words, “‘cause I f***ing don’t”), and no cars willing to pick him up, he must walk across the border to County Louth, eventually collapsing on the verge outside his sister’s house. Anna (Helen Behan) doesn’t recognise him at first, and her husband Michael (Frank Laverty) won’t let him get too close. When she finally realises who he is, 30 years since she last laid eyes on him, she crumbles.

Later on, after Joseph has slept for 24 hours – a disturbed, frantic sleep, captured through disorienting camera angles and distorted shots – the pair reconcile. It is, by a long way, the episode’s most powerful scene. Why did Joseph never get back in touch, Anna wants to know. “I was just such a big f***-up,” he says. “You had a good life and that, you had the kids, you had Michael and that, and…” “Part of my heart was missing, though,” she interjects, plainly, devastatingly. “Part of my heart was missing.” Both actors are astonishing here: Behan, a part-time nurse who met Meadows in a pub years ago and scrawled down her details on a till receipt, holds her own alongside the more experienced Graham, who plays Joseph with a subjugated pathos that is at once compelling and repellent. The two are not competing, though – they are carrying each other.

Helen Behan and Stephen Graham in the episode’s most powerful scene (Channel 4/Dean Rogers) (Channel 4 / Dean Rogers)

Thankfully, Meadows knows when to break the tension with humour – he has done since his This is England series began back in 2006. A degree of light relief comes in the form of Michael’s sister Dinah (Niamh Algar), a sweary tearaway who arrives literally kicking and screaming. She is prickly at first – making wonderfully passive aggressive comments about the final helping of spag bol – but there are hints that there’s compassion to come from her.

Compassion, in fact, is Meadows’ secret weapon. The writer-director finds the decency and humanity in the kinds of people you might cross the street to avoid, and Joseph – at his lowest – is such a person. But he is also a kind, broken man searching for peace. It is a testament to Meadows’ empathetic lens that after just two episodes, we’re all desperately rooting for Joseph to find it.