Trespasses

The Weight of Whispers

I have always found it a bit suspicious when television uses a warzone as a backdrop for a swooning romance. There is a cheapness to it, a tendency to borrow the very real trauma of historical conflict just to give two conventionally attractive people a reason to look sad while making out. So when I sat down to watch *Trespasses*, Channel 4's four-part adaptation of Louise Kennedy’s 2022 novel, my guard was up. Another Troubles drama. Another star-crossed Catholic and Protestant. I have seen this trick before. Yet director Dawn Shadforth does not play the usual games. Instead of relying on the noise of bombs to create tension, she tunes into the frightening, absolute silence of self-policing.



The mechanics of survival in 1975 Holywood, a small town just outside Belfast, are entirely unspoken. You don't say the wrong thing. You don't wear the wrong colors. You certainly don't look too long at the wrong person. Cushla (Lola Petticrew) is a 24-year-old Catholic primary school teacher who spends her evenings pulling pints at her brother's pub, a space rendered in fifty shades of nicotine brown. Watch how Petticrew navigates the floor during a shift. Their shoulders are hunched, their eyes constantly darting to the door, measuring the temperature of the room when off-duty British soldiers get loud. It is a quiet study in the physical toll of vigilance. When Michael (Tom Cullen), an older, married Protestant barrister walks in, the air changes. Shadforth shoots their initial encounters not with sweeping romantic wide shots, but in tight, suffocating close-ups. The danger is not out on the street. It is right there in the space between their hands on the sticky mahogany bar.

Cullen is compelling here, entirely weaponizing the kind of quiet, tweedy masculinity he used so effectively in *Downton Abbey*. He plays Michael as a man who thinks he is too sophisticated for sectarianism, taking on civil rights cases for Catholic boys as if his privilege acts as a bulletproof vest. He is charming, sure, but there is a casual arrogance to his affection. (Whether that arrogance is a deliberate character choice or just the side effect of playing a wealthy barrister, I am not entirely sure). Petticrew, fresh off their explosive turn as a Provo bomber in *Say Nothing*, anchors the dynamic. They don't play Cushla as a tragic victim. There is a defensive sarcasm to her, a refusal to be saved, even as she waits by the phone like a lovestruck teenager.



If there is a misstep in this otherwise tightly wound narrative, it is the sheer gravitational pull of Gillian Anderson. As Cushla’s widowed, gin-soaked mother Gina, Anderson is swinging for the fences. She spends most of her screen time confined to an armchair, slurring insults and falling over furniture. It is a big, loud performance in a show that otherwise thrives on whispers. *The Irish Times*' Ed Power correctly noted that she "steals every scene she is in, even when she is clearly not supposed to be the centre of attention." I could not look away from her, but I also kept wondering if she belonged in a different, more theatrical play.

Yet, even with Anderson sucking up the oxygen, the show works because it understands the grubby reality of its premise. This is not a fairy tale. The sex is messy and desperate. The lovers don't escape their circumstances; they drag them into bed. There is a particular scene in the third episode where Cushla casually brings her new, bohemian habits home—tearing apart a baguette with her hands, cooking with garlic. Her family looks at her as if she is speaking Russian. It is a tiny detail, but it brilliantly illustrates how a person changes when they cross invisible borders.



Ultimately, *Trespasses* asks a rather uncomfortable question about love. Sometimes we need the obstacle to make the feeling real. Without the British checkpoints, without the angry priests and the suffocating tribal lines, would Cushla and Michael actually have anything to talk about? Shadforth leaves that hanging in the damp Northern Irish air. The tragedy of this series is not just that politics ruined a romance. It is the creeping realization that in a fractured world, stealing a little joy almost always means someone else is going to pay the price.