Holding review: Adaptation of Graham Norton novel bows out with a tepid finale
Charlene McKenna and Amy Conroy in the final episode of Holding, on ITV.
The mystery of a baby’s remains and a missing man are dramatically solved in the season finale of Holding, a four-part drama shot on location in West Cork. For all the reveals, it’s a tepid finale to a season that has felt like less than the sum of its parts.
Following the events of the penultimate episode, Evelyn Ross (Charlene McKenna) is held for questioning as it becomes apparent she was one of the last people to see Tommy Burke alive and may have been pregnant with his child. The plot thickens when local garda PJ (Conleth Hill) discovers a letter from Burke to Evelyn dated 2002. As his colleague puts it: “Tommy Burke disappeared in 2001. We have a letter from a dead man.”
A sequence set around the village’s ‘Doneen Rocks’ festival is played for cheesy fun but the jokes don’t land. And as has happened often through the series, the dramatic reveal of a character’s illness jars badly with the humour that has come before. Crucially, it sucks much of the tension out of the finale as we finally learn more of the mystery that has plagued the village for two decades.
Much of the story centres around the Ross sisters and to what extent some or all of them were involved in Tommy’s death. Evelyn is devastated to learn of her sister Abigail’s (Helen Behan) terminal illness.
It emerges that Abigail has been carrying a burden she agrees to reveal to PJ about the night Tommy Burke died. There were tragic circumstances, as she expresses her fury at seeing her sister lose her baby as Burke drunkenly leered at her.
After putting her devastated sister to bed, Abigail reveals she returned to the property and was incensed to find Burke still there, “without a flicker of guilt”. When he then made an advance on her, she pushed him, leading to Burke’s grim fall onto the spike of a thresher.
“It’s been pulling me down for 20 years, the shame and the guilt,” she says. “But I would do it again. Because he hurt my little sister and we’d already been hurting so much.”
Tone has been the main difficulty facing the makers of Holding, as the blend of comedy and darkness rarely co-exist peacefully. As many filmmakers will attest, combining the two is notoriously difficult to successfully pull off. Here, it’s a storytelling challenge that has a knock-on effect, creating a distance between the viewer and the characters’ predicaments.
It feels like a misfire for a series that boasts such a fine cast and is adapted from Graham Norton’s well-regarded novel.
- Holding begins on Virgin Media More on Tuesday, April 12
