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The Landscapers (2021)

2021 · Comedy,Crime,Drama · dramatized-true-crime, crime-psychological-profiler

The Landscapers poster

A four-part HBO/Sky dramaturgy of a real British true-crime case — a mild-mannered couple convicted of murdering the wife's parents and burying them in their garden — told with radical formal audacity: genre pastiches, fourth-wall breaks, western sequences, and monochrome melodrama sit alongside quiet domestic devastation. Olivia Colman and David Thewlis anchor the show with performances of enormous warmth and strangeness, generating unusual sympathy for convicted killers. The tone is peculiarly British in its dark comedy and emotional restraint, while the structural restlessness reflects the couple's own fantasy-saturated inner lives. Best suited to viewers who enjoy prestige character studies that foreground filmmaking as argument.

From the reviewers

Landscapers is neither and instead takes its filmic cue from the murderous couple's adoration for old romance and westerns. As such the four episode miniseries is alive with action scenes, arch fourth wall deconstructions, monochrome melodrama, soft focus romanticism and everything in between.
Its layered restlessness accompanied by some charged performances and a deep empathy for the characters (and people) gave it a strange charm and I found myself completely won over by it.
The scene cuts are flawless and the cinematography dark and vivid.
The performances are terrific, especially Olivia Coleman who is brilliant. But the whole movie is done with all these strange film references that I don't think make any sense.
things like the big Western sequences that fill up one episode seems more like a way to get a TV movie length show up to four episodes

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