Rellik sounds like the name of the latest Scandi-noir detective with a fondness for schnapps. But by now you probably know it’s also killer, backwards – a clever encapsulation of the latest high-concept crime drama from Jack and Harry Williams (creators of The Missing, One of Us and ITV’s Liar) because Rellik is a serial killer story told backwards, its narrative parcelled out in brief chunks in the style of films like Memento.
As DCI Gabriel Markham, an acid-scarred, bitumen-throated cop fuelled by vengeance, Richard Dormer (AKA Game of Thrones’s one-eyed flaming sword-swinger Beric) is the nominal star. But Rellik wants to turn everyone into detectives, forcing us to piece together its moonwalking murder mystery from clues as we go.
After a summer where the closest most of us have come to a brainteaser has been working out the latest acrostic in a Trump resignation letter, processing a serial killer investigation seems a big ask. So let’s do it together.
Rewind
In a back-to-front story, the opening scene – introducing Gabriel as a scowling insomniac who has a case-breaking brainwave while grabbing booze at an all-night garage at 3am – will presumably end up being crucial. With zero context beyond rolling news stating “acid murder suspect shot”, Rellik immediately lurches into gothic, with Gabriel clambering into a graveyard on a stormy night before clawing at the resting place of Edith Grey to retrieve a pill bottle. Only a few minutes in and our scarred hero has already had a Shawshank moment of rainy catharsis. How did we get here?
That’s when Rellik introduces its signature effect: a queasy montage of reversed footage to signal its first time jump backwards. Suddenly it’s 10 hours earlier and the acid murder suspect Steven Mills (Michael Shaeffer) is loitering outside a primary school. When Gabriel attempts to bring him in, things go badly wrong, and Mills is sniped with such force his body flies over 10 feet into the school pond. Despite him being unarmed, the cops see this as a win – all except gloomy DI Shepard (Jodi Balfour), who has a debrief with Gabriel in his car. There is a suggestion that their relationship predates his acid attack.
Another rewind, five hours this time, and we meet three possible suspects (four if you count the great Ray Stevenson as Gabriel’s harried boss DS Benton). A city slicker with Kingsman glasses (played by Paul Rhys) hustles to catch a plane. An irate therapist is pulled out of a session to see a newsflash. And in a brief cutaway, we glimpse a scarred woman in hospital, a tear rolling down her cheek.
Stuck in traffic, Gabriel also gets to lay out what seems like Rellik’s mission statement as he deduces the sorry backstory of a drug-addicted windscreen-washer: “If we go back far enough, if we can understand why people do what they do, if we can understand the motive, then maybe we wouldn’t spend so much time chasing our own tails.” The police are closing in on the school, and we realise the action is about to sync up with Mills being shot, which surely means …
… another time jump, back three hours and 33 minutes. This is where we belatedly see some actual police work, with Mills’s wife Beth and daughter Allie brought in for questioning while Gabriel’s team search their home. Shepard and Gabriel learn that, after a previous violent episode, Mills had been diagnosed with schizophrenia but has long been managing his condition with medication. There are three frantic voicemails from Mills on Beth’s phone, and when he calls again Gabriel convinces her to set up the fateful primary school meet.
Mills makes Beth promise to meet her mother with him, and Gabriel zeroes in on that remark. It turns out that her mother, Edith Grey, has been dead for years. This is a satisfying lightbulb moment for armchair sleuths, who can connect that name with the gravestone in the opening scene. But there are also other juicy clues being dangled: what’s the significance of the charred aftermath of a small fire in the police station? And why, according to his browsing history, does Mills have an obsession with porn featuring sleeping women?
Another five-hour rewind and we witness a missed rendezvous between Mills – wounded and scared – and his psychiatrist Isaac Taylor (Paterson Joseph), the therapist we saw earlier, at a roadside cafe. Taylor has some rather pernickety ways: he’s a man so wary of other people’s skin cells that he carries surgical gloves and disinfectant wipes wherever he goes. Useful for avoiding infection, or for avoiding leaving DNA evidence?
We also, belatedly, get a look at an actual murder scene in a derelict warehouse. Shepard reveals that the victim was killed before acid was poured on their face, which doesn’t fit their pattern. Gabriel also notes that it hasn’t been staged in a playground “this time”, which suggests some grim crime scenes in the weeks to come. A charged encounter between Gabriel and the scarred woman, Christine, reveals he considers her his prime suspect, and likely the person who attacked him with acid.
There is a final rewind, albeit one that crams in two rug-pulling moments. It’s early morning and we discover Gabriel has a previously unmentioned wife and teenage kid (and that his wife is aware of his affair with Shepard). And we witness a panicking Mills being coerced into committing murder while being filmed, even if he does manage – after a frantic, gunshot-punctuated scramble – to flee with a bullet wound and the data card. A data card that ends up in a pill bottle in his mother-in-law’s grave.
Press play
So what happens if we review what happened in the right order? In the course of one rather eventful day, Steven Mills was forced to commit murder, presumably – but not definitely – by the actual serial killer. Mills managed to escape with evidence that could clear his name but contacted his therapist Isaac Taylor instead of going to the police. Gabriel promised his wife he’d break off his affair with Shepard but that didn’t go to plan, and neither did his attempts to bring in Mills alive. But he did manage to recover that vital data card at the death – we just won’t get to see how he uses it until the final episode.
Notes and observations
• That all-night garage with a “HELLO” sign where the “O” is calculatedly on the blink is an early indicator that we are deep in heightened Luther-style cop-noir territory.
• The unexpected fisticuffs between two cops – later revealed as the result of tension over their gay workplace affair – felt a little superfluous, but perhaps each episode will have its own subplot that can be tied off to maintain a sense of forward momentum.
• We know the killer apparently attacked Gabriel with acid, scarring half his face, but it has had time enough to heal for him to return to active duty, suggesting the investigation might stretch back weeks or even months.
• Considering we’re travelling back in time, it’ll be interesting to see how episode two handles the traditional “previously on Rellik” montage. Shouldn’t it be “later on Rellik”?
Did you enjoy Rellik’s reverse-storytelling gimmick? What did you make of antihero Gabriel Markham? Have you got it figured out already? Let us know in the comments below.
