Reunion, review: thriller told with BSL shows that silence can be a powerful weapon
In a TV landscape dominated by emotive soundtracks, shouting and explosions, silence is a powerful weapon. Reunion (BBC One), a revenge thriller about a deaf man released from prison after 10 years who sets out on a mission to right some corrosive wrongs, uses that weapon to shrewd effect.
Written by deaf scriptwriter William Mager, it's a bilingual series featuring a mixture of British Sign Language, spoken English and some subtitles. With a mainly deaf production crew and a mission to present Sheffield's deaf community authentically, Reunion could easily have become 'that deaf show', cart before horse. But this is an excellent four-parter that never lets its own backstory overshadow the enduring demands of good drama.
The superb Matthew Gurney plays Daniel Brennan, who as the series begins has just been released. We discover that Brennan killed one of his oldest and closest friends, Ray (Ace Mahbaz), in an unexplained attack. Piece by piece, dropping clues like crumbs and using flashbacks and reveals, the show explains it.
There is an element of deliberate withholding of information and fear of mid-series slump here that at times grates. By the end of the fourth episode it's apparent that Reunion is a very good show but merely a quite good thriller. But you wouldn't want to find out what happened to Brennan at all if you didn't find him intriguing and it is here that Reunion excels. Brennan's character is a brilliant creation – he is the strong, silent action hero who can crack a few skulls, but he is also a perennial outsider, spurned by the deaf community and the non-deaf alike. This deaf man neither wants nor gets your pity. He is dislikable, a hothead and a fool but he is never a victim. It means that while he fits within one TV stereotype – white, male, capricious anti-hero – he breaks right out of another.
Technically, Reunion is also a tour de force, using subtitles, sound effects and that precious silence judiciously so that the viewer's sense of another world that operates on a different frequency is a continual, subtle surprise. That has the happy side-effect of creating a show that looks and feels like no other – in the age of streaming superabundance, this is distinctly welcome.
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