They, in this case, are Susan and Christopher Edwards of Nottinghamshire, England, who are played, in a coup of casting, by Olivia Colman and David Thewlis.
The Edwardses claimed that Susan’s mother had shot her husband and that Susan, who hated her abusive parents, had been provoked into shooting her mother — a crime of passion followed by years’ of guilt-ridden cover-up.
The case is full of fascinating and outlandish details — a straightforward retelling would have no trouble being greenlit — but one stands out: what they spent the money on.
Ed Sinclair, a first-time screenwriter, and the director Will Sharpe build their four-episode series around that detail, in imaginative and highly stylized ways that shift the focus away from true-crime investigation.
Others he stages like full-on Hollywood productions, echoing the films Susan loves, like “High Noon” and “The Last Metro.” At key moments Sharpe literally breaks the fourth wall, pulling back the camera to show us the soundstage as the actors, in and out of character, walk from one set to another.
They set up a theme of artifice and delusion, but “Landscapers,” thankfully, isn’t about the tyranny of modern media — it’s more about the ways in which ordinary, troubled people make sense of their lives by casting themselves in the stories of heroism and self-sacrifice that they’ve seen at the movies.
If “Landscapers” doesn’t, in the end, entirely fulfill the promise of Sharpe’s visual wizardry, it’s down to the screenplay by Sinclair, who is also Colman’s husband and producing partner.
The script does much better by Chris, though, and “Landscapers” is a showcase for Thewlis, with his angular frame and his distinctive style of commanding awkwardness.
Thewlis is phenomenal throughout — in a pinpoint moment when Chris is thrown off by evidence of Susan’s dishonesty, or in the larger gestures of the movie-love scenes, as when he twirls a six-shooter like a pro .