Two years ago, Richard Gadd had a surprise TV hit with his autobiographical Netflix drama about being stalked. This follow-up about two step-brothers is equally shocking.
In Richard Gadd’s follow up to his galvanising Netflix hit Baby Reindeer, the character he plays roars on to the screen, a glaring, fearsome hulk of a man ready to explode with rage. Ruben arrives as an uninvited guest disrupting his brother’s wedding at a Scottish farm, and from the opening scene to the very end Half Man is almost unbearably intense. We wait every minute for Ruben to lash out in violence, which he does more than once.
Gadd created, wrote and stars in Half Man, as he did in the autobiographical Baby Reindeer, where his character was the victim of stalking and sexual abuse. In many ways the new series is different. It is not autobiographical and this time Gadd plays the tormentor. Owing to their mothers being in a relationship, Ruben and Niall (Jamie Bell) were raised as brothers since adolescence. Each episode moves the wedding forward, while flashing back to follow their destructive codependent relationship. It starts in the late 1980s when Niall is 15, meek and bullied at school, and Ruben, 17, returns from a young offender’s institution having bitten off another boy’s nose. Their lives unravel, but not all at once.
But Half Man is just as brash and singular as Baby Reindeer. It shares themes with that surprise hit and is also likely to be a conversation-starter. Once more Gadd offers a painstaking exploration of masculine identity, violence and reluctance to accept one’s sexual identity. That violence is graphic enough to make the characters’ emotional traumas feel visceral.
Gadd, as the belligerent, troubled Ruben, and Bell, as the confused brother who worships and fears him, are thoroughly convincing in their complexity. And the young actors who play the teenage versions of them, Stuart Campbell and Mitchell Robertson, are shockingly great discoveries.
