With its underestimated heroine, this British crime drama twists an old format

4 days ago 10

Code of Silence ★★★★

In this compelling British crime drama the protagonist is a character who yearns for something more, even if it puts her life and liberty at risk. Alison Woods (Rose Ayling-Ellis) is a young deaf woman, juggling jobs in the city of Canterbury. Her day shift is kitchen hand at the police station canteen, where a desperate officer Detective Sergeant Ashleigh Francis (Charotte Ritchie), borrows her. A criminal gang planning a robbery is under surveillance, and the investigators need a lip-reader to parse their covert footage.

Smart, underestimated, and just embittered enough to be reckless, Alison jumps at the opportunity. The hearing world finally wants something from her – even with the few words she can glean from the covert scrutiny, Ashleigh and her boss, Detective Inspector James Marsh (Andrew Buchan), are excited.

If they can crack the gang’s planning and participants, the police can scoop them up before they strike. It’s an adventure, especially when Ashleigh takes Alison into a pub where the crooks are meeting to give her a direct line of sight.

Created by Catherine Moulton, who bounces back after the unsatisfying Disney+ thriller The Stolen Girl, Code of Silence is an unconventional take on a familiar genre. It is a procedural, but the subject isn’t really the police tactics. Instead, it’s how Alison and her mother, Julie (Fifi Garfield), who is also deaf, navigate a world that casually marginalises them. Using British Sign Language, the two support each other and try to find workarounds. Good jobs are difficult to find. Lousy ones are easy to lose.

Alison (Rose Ayling-Ellis) falls for gang member Liam (Kieron Moore) when she is recruited by the police to spy on the gang.

Periodically, the sound will drop out or distort downwards, offering a hint of how Alison experiences it. The story-telling does the same with her intentions. She wants to be involved with the investigation, even as the detectives caution her against encroaching where she wouldn’t, and her eagerness gets further twisted when she sights Liam Barlow (Kieron Moore), the gang’s new tech support. Attuned to people’s faces, Alison is struck by something in Liam. It’s unclear whether she wants to convict him or save him.

The storytelling is concise but telling when it comes to Alison. She’s in over her head, especially once she gets a barmaid’s job in the pub Liam frequents, which happens to be owned by the gang’s enforcer, Braden Moore (Joe Absolom). Alison has to improvise as she tries to prove to the police and Liam that she is useful, while hiding her involvement with each from the other. Ayling-Ellis is particularly good at capturing the increasingly tense snap decisions Alison has to make.

In a welcome example of representation that matters situationally and symbolically, all the actors playing deaf characters in the six-part series are deaf. And there’s nuance in how Moulton writes them. Alison has recently broken up with her deaf boyfriend, council officer Eithan (Rolf Choutan), because she bristles at his privilege. His parents have paid for his schooling and apartment deposit, but when Alison looks up the course to become a qualified police lip-reader she finds a fee in the thousands of pounds. Dead end.

All this ties together in ways that are unexpected and quick to escalate. The question of what, or who, Alison truly wants is rarely explicit, and Ayling-Lewis lets you see how that plays out from a place of anger and naïveté. “I don’t want to be hearing,” an exasperated Alison signs to her mother, “just for them to be a bit deaf.” Code of Silence makes that more than wishful thinking.

Code of Silence is now streaming on SBS on Demand.

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