Edge of darkness movie trailer

Casino Royale's Martin Campbell returns to familiar territory with this adaptation of his own 1985 BBC miniseries.

Edge of Darkness full cast and crew

Mel Gibson

Ray Winstone

Danny Huston

Bojana Novakovic

Shawn Roberts

David Aaron Baker

Jay O. Sanders

Denis O'Hare

Damian Young

Caterina Scorsone

Frank Grillo

Wayne Duvall

Gbenga Akinnagbe

Gabrielle Popa

Paul Sparks


Directed by  Martin Campbell 

Edge of Darkness overview

I had just started working as a television writer when Edge of Darkness was first ­broadcast in 1985 and I felt – to paraphrase ­another masterpiece written by Troy Kennedy Martin – someone had blown the bloody doors off. The series was all the things ­popular drama was not ­supposed to be. It was ­complicated. It was a downer (there's no happy ­ending). It was paranoid and overtly political.

Yet it was a massive­ success: Edge of Darkness ­(pictured below) was originally shown on BBC2; the schedules were then cleared to allow an immediate repeat on BBC1. This was event TV by ­acclamation. You can still trace its influence 25 years on, although I don't think that's always been a good thing. The conspiracy theory has become an off-the-peg solution for ­writing about politics in ­Britain – to the detriment of writing, politics and Britain. If The Wire had been made here, its hero McNulty would have discovered that Baltimore's problems were not the result of a shortsighted political culture, or the weakness of ­human ­nature, but were the fault of one property ­developer in a polo-neck.

But there was more to Edge of Darkness than conspiracy. When he was working on it, Kennedy Martin used to say he was writing a series "about a cop who turns into a tree". That really was how he planned to end it. He was overruled by Bob Peck, who probably felt he'd left his pretending-to-be-a-tree days behind him in drama school. But the mad, poetic ambition behind that idea still makes its presence felt. ­Craven's daughter belonged to a group called Gaia, a reference to the Gaia Hypothesis, which views the Earth as a single organism. When black flowers sprout at the end of the final episode, that's the Earth asserting itself as an actor in the drama.

I get the feeling that Kennedy Martin was at war with the nature of TV itself. He was co-creator of Z Cars; a show about cops who drink, smoke and beat their wives, it was a benchmark for naturalism. But once Z Cars had been on for a few weeks, the main ­characters became stars and that undid their reality – just like the "real" people on ­today's ­"reality" shows. Naturalism, decided Kennedy Martin, was a swiz. He wrote an anti-­naturalist diatribe in Encore magazine. And then he wrote Edge of Darkness, in which one of the main characters is a ghost and the other ends up as a version of the Green Man.

If you want to find someone who took up this challenge to naturalism, you'd have to look to comedy, to The Day Today and The Office, not to drama. Of course, the reason Edge of ­Darkness worked was the ­simple raw emotion of Craven's relationship with his daughter, his refusal to accept her death – and his quest to understand her life. In the end, the ­greatest mystery isn't what's going on inside some nuclear ­facility, but what's going on ­inside the heads of those we love.

Edge of Darkness review

he Polish drama "In Darkness," one of this year's Oscar nominees in the foreign-language category, reads like "Schindler's List" in miniature: A gentile of dubious morals reluctantly comes to the aid of Jews threatened with extinction during the Holocaust, and becomes ennobled by the effort.

In the hands of director Agnieszka Holland (who previously explored the Holocaust in "Europa, Europa" in 1990), "In Darkness" is a thoughtful and harrowing drama about the lengths people will go to survive — and the changes of heart that one person undergoes to help them.

When we first meet Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), he's a full-time sewer worker and sometime thief in Lvov, Poland, at the start of World War II, scraping by on a meager salary as he tries to support his wife Wanda (Kinga Preis) and their daughter. With the Germans occupying Poland, Socha and his co-worker Stefek (Krzysztof Skonieczny) sometimes find and stash gold and jewels left behind by those forced into the Jewish ghetto. When the Nazis clear out the ghetto, Socha and Stefek discover that dozens of Jews have found their way into the sewer system, and are trying to hide there.

Socha offers to find a safe hiding spot for about a dozen of these Jews. At first, Socha does this for money, taking a weekly payment from a wealthy couple (Maria Schrader and Herbert Knaup). Over time, and as the Jews' money runs out, Socha perseveres to protect them for free. To do so, Socha not only must outwit the Nazis and their Lithuanian Army helpers, but overcome Wanda's qualms and his own prejudices against Jews.

Holland and first-time screenwriter David F. Shamoon (adapting Robert Maxwell's book In the Sewers of Lvov), captures the life-and-death uncertainty of the Jews' underground lives, as they learn to tolerate rats, filth and the stench — along with the worries for loved ones who may still be alive above. The scenes have a claustrophobic tension, as characters live, argue and even love with the knowledge that someone above might hear them.

The film's bleak atmosphere — which Holland augments with staccato bursts of violence, depicting the Nazis' cruelty — is held together by Wieckiewicz's central performance, which shows Socha's hard-bitten pragmatism slowly softened by the tenderness and respect he feels for the Jews under his protection. It's through Socha's transformation that "In Darkness" finds its way to the light.

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