LANDSCAPERS: Beautiful and Cruel – That’s What Life Really Is

If it weren’t for the internet, many viewers probably wouldn’t believe that the story shown on screen actually happened. Indeed, life supposedly writes the best scripts, yet Landscapers is so saturated with absurdity that it’s hard to believe the screenplay isn’t the work of an author completely detached from reality. It’s worth emphasizing, however – the most important elements of the production are based on facts, which doesn’t mean that certain details weren’t added here and there to make the plot even more engaging.

Here is the good, quiet Edwards couple – Susan (Olivia Colman) takes care of the house while browsing antique shops in search of items somehow connected to famous actors, and Christopher (David Thewlis) looks for a job to support the family. Money is slowly running out, the man wants to secure a peaceful old age for himself and Susan, but since they live in France and he doesn’t speak the language, his search for employment is not going well.

Time passes, desperation grows, and at some point, Christopher symbolically presses the red button, blowing up his former life – he calls a family member living in the UK and announces that he needs cash, and by the way, that he and his wife are responsible for the death of her parents.

Landscapers is a half-fictionalized true crime recalling the bizarre investigation from 1998, and half an imagined story by Ed Sinclair (Colman’s husband in private life, which is not without importance here) about a couple so strange they’re almost wonderful. The Edwardses love each other madly, which is visible at every stage of their lives together thanks to the actors. At the same time, they’re so clumsy that it’s hard to say how they managed to evade justice for over a dozen years. But should they really be convicted of murder?

True, they admit to being responsible for the death of one of Susan’s parents, but on the other hand, they present a very credible picture of a dysfunctional family in which Susan grew up. One might argue that crime should never be excused, but how can one judge whether the young woman didn’t, in a sense, have the right to revenge for what happened to her in youth?

That’s the whole beauty of Landscapers – the main plot points are known from the start, yet the magic lies in the details told by the couple and in the form in which the story is wrapped. At first glance, we seem to be dealing with a tale of crime and punishment meted out years later. As the four-part miniseries progresses, however, it becomes clear that Sinclair is less interested in the criminal mystery and more focused on the emotions of the main couple, especially those they feel toward each other. 

Landscapers is therefore a bizarre love story about two life outsiders who found in each other’s arms the warmth they had long been missing. But nature abhors imbalance, so every day they slowly move toward the embrace of merciless fate. The characters cannot bear the cruel reality, so they often escape into fantasy. Accordingly, the creators frequently show how their imagination might look – for example, portraying their emotional turmoil in a western-style duel scene, or showing them riding a horse toward the setting sun.

Through the Edwardses’ story, the creators show that a love for cinema has two faces – it helps escape the hardships of daily life, but it also artificially romanticizes ordinary everyday existence, distancing people from real life. While watching Landscapers, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the series is an act of love from a husband to his wife. Ed Sinclair structured the script to give Olivia Colman space at every level to create another fascinating role.

On the narrative level, Landscapers is, after all, a story about Christopher’s boundless love for Susan, for whom he’s willing to do anything. At the same time, Susan turns out to be a remarkably loyal partner capable of surprising little lies just to keep her husband in a tolerable mental state. Colman can express on her face both sides of her character’s soul – childlike confusion and the will to survive at all costs, innocence and incredible strength.

Landscapers is above all a duet performance by two actors, thanks to whom this unusual love story resonates in full. The British series is yet another example that love between two people can still be shown on screen in an unexpected, non-stereotypical way. It deserves appreciation as a work that doesn’t artificially inflate emotions with cheap tricks, but instead places its weight on the truth of life. Beautiful and cruel – because that’s what life really is.