Critic Reviews

From its subtle opening to the explosive final episode, this is a truly great piece of television: after all, there’s nothing more powerful than being heard.

An intriguing, ominous and slightly woo-woo four-parter.

The Listeners can be challenging. But that doesn’t mean it won’t reward patient viewing. Bravo and Tannahill have created a parabolic nightmare that deploys genre conventions in service of an elliptical tale of human nature.

At a mere four episodes long, The Listeners is a fast-moving and punchy look at the myriad factors that can draw well-adjusted people to radicalisation; humanising the victims of conspiracy culture – but crucially, not downplaying the damage it has wrought.

The only besetting flaw in the tale is that there is so much loving attention lavished on Claire and her unravelling that the other characters can feel underdeveloped. .... It’s a loud bum note in a thoughtful, thought-provoking drama otherwise full of nuance and put together with surpassing care and delicacy.

“The Listeners” arrives with some of the appointments of a horror movie—and if one were subject to a constant roar like Claire’s, one might indeed scream. But the film proceeds at its own steady pace as measured by Ms. Bravo, with a psycho-cinematic complexity that transcends any routine mystery movie.

At the series’ core is a deeply felt performance from Rebecca Hall. .... “The Listeners” is more cinematically expressive than most television fare; it creates a mood as much as it tells a story, and finds creative ways to depict characters losing contact with external reality.

Let Rebecca Hall guide you down a rabbit hole of auditory madness — and maybe a kind of ecstasy? — in The Listeners. We heard you’re gonna love it.

You can look for metaphors and social comment here — there are references to conspiracy theories and industrial noise pollution and such — but it seems to me to operate most effectively as a beautifully rendered mood piece and character study, and, certainly in the case of Hall, whose story this is, a platform for some exquisitely subtle acting.

Tannahill’s series cherishes dancing between the demanding allure of the unknown and the fearful certainty of what can happen when pursuing it. Hall knows the steps inside and out, crafting a layered, knowing character who never feels as abstract as the world around her, and Bravo breaks up many steady, static frames with dreamy, hypnotic imagery to better illustrate Claire’s slackening tether to reality.