A Puzzle Built on Pain and Persistence

TV SERIES REVIEW
Down Cemetery Road
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Genre: Thriller, Drama, Mystery
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 8 x 1h episodes
Director(s): Natalie Bailey
Writer(s): Morwenna Banks (based on the novel by Mick Herron)
Cast: Emma Thompson, Ruth Wilson, Adeel Akhtar, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Darren Boyd, Tom Goodman-Hill
Where to Watch: available on Apple TV October 29, 2025

RAVING REVIEW: DOWN CEMETERY ROAD is like a lingering echo — soft, deliberate, and full of buried truths that refuse to stay hidden. Apple TV+ continues its fascination with morally complex thrillers by adapting Mick Herron’s debut novel, turning the sleepy streets of Oxford into a stage for obsession, guilt, and reckoning. It’s something slower and heavier — a meditation disguised as a mystery.

When an explosion shatters the peace of an Oxford suburb and a young girl vanishes, two women are drawn into the aftermath for reasons neither fully understands. Ruth Wilson plays Sarah Trafford, a woman whose curiosity borders on compulsion, while Emma Thompson’s private investigator Zoë Boehm becomes the unlikely ally she never asked for. Together, they navigate a conspiracy in which the line between the living and the dead blurs —not in the supernatural sense, but through the manipulations of those who treat both as expendable.

Morwenna Banks’ adaptation distills Herron’s layered prose into something at once restrained and sharp. There’s an immediate familiarity for fans of her work on SLOW HORSES, but this world trades bureaucratic cynicism for personal loss. Instead of burnt-out spies, we follow two women scarred by disillusionment and longing, clinging to meaning in a place that’s forgotten how to feel.

Thompson, who also executive produces, delivers one of her most introspective performances in years. Zoë Boehm isn’t a genre archetype — she’s not the “hard-boiled” investigator with sharp comebacks and sharper instincts. She’s weary, empathetic, and terrifyingly aware of how the world turns grief into currency. Thompson plays her with restraint, letting silence do the heavy lifting. You can feel a lifetime of compromise in every side glance and half-swallowed sentence.

Ruth Wilson matches her energy but channels it differently. Sarah is emotionally restless — a woman who’s turned voyeurism into self-preservation (quite literally). Wilson understands the thrill and shame of curiosity, the way looking too long at tragedy becomes a form of escape. Their chemistry isn’t built on opposition but reflection; they are mirror images of each other’s damage. The show’s greatest strength lies in the way these two women connect through the absence of family, of safety, of answers.

Director Natalie Bailey brings a precise visual language to the material. Oxford isn’t romanticized or reduced to its lesser parts — instead, the camera lingers on its stillness, the unsettling quiet of a neighborhood holding its breath. Bailey lets light and long shadows tell the story, trading spectacle for tension that seeps in like damp air. Each frame feels burdened by history, every conversation slightly haunted by what’s left unsaid.

Supporting performances add texture rather than noise. Adeel Akhtar brings warmth and morality as Hamza, grounding the series whenever its mystery threatens to drift too far into abstraction. Darren Boyd and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett turn seemingly peripheral roles into emotional anchors, their characters revealing how truth and survival rarely coexist. The ensemble works because everyone plays against melodrama — even the most shocking moments feel earned through exhaustion rather than excess.

DOWN CEMETERY ROAD is about what happens after the explosion — not the literal one that begins the story, but the emotional kind that redefines who we are. The investigation itself feels secondary to the deeper search for meaning in a morally eroded world. Banks’ writing refuses neat resolutions; clues often lead to more confusion, and moral victories leave bruises.

Visually, the series feels almost literary. The use of reflection — in mirrors, puddles, glass panes — becomes symbolic of the show’s obsession with double lives and fractured identities. The editing feels novelistic too, letting moments of silence stretch just long enough to become uncomfortable. Even the sound design contributes to the tension — distant sirens, the creak of a half-open door, and the hum of streetlights replacing traditional score cues until Martin Phipps’ subtle music slips in like guilt returning at midnight.

As the eight episodes progress, the conspiracy becomes less about government secrets and more about the emotional fallout of being lied to — by institutions, by loved ones, and by oneself. It’s this psychological depth that elevates DOWN CEMETERY ROAD from standard prestige mystery into something far more unsettling and lasting.

DOWN CEMETERY ROAD isn’t here to thrill in the conventional sense — it’s here to haunt. It’s a ghost story without ghosts, a detective tale about the futility of closure. What lingers isn’t the explosion or the mystery, but the silence that follows when everything familiar is gone. It’s a series meant to breathe, to echo, to make viewers confront what they’d rather forget. And that’s precisely what gives it power.

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