Dir: Ed Bazalgette | Scr: Chris Lang | Ph: Tim Palmer | Prod: Colin Wratten | Mus: Paul Englishby | Ed: Mark Davis | PD: Paul Cripps | AD: Siobhan Pemberton | Cast: Hermione Norris, Martin Clunes, Paul McGann, Alexander Arnold, Nicola Walker, Annabelle Apsion, Charles Daish, Antonia Clarke, Jake Davies, Ellie Bamber, Josef Altin
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After the body of a murdered teenaged girl is discovered in the reeds near to their small town home, a woman finds a pair of blood-stained trainers under the bed of her similarly aged son, who had claimed the previous day that said footwear had been stolen from his locker at school, and begins to suspect – as more evidence comes to light – that he may have somehow played a part in her death. At first she neither confronts him nor confides in her husband – the boy’s stepfather – but looks to her ex- for support. Though he manages to dissuade her initially from doing anything rash, as time passes and the truth becomes ever more apparent, they become forced to confront the horrific unthinkableness of their situation. For the most part, A Mother’s Son is a gripping, well-acted drama examining one of the lesser explored facets of criminal activity – or at least it is when it's not mining inappropriate mystery-thriller tropes. However, the ending, which feels completely out of sync with the rest of the piece and lacks any sort of credibility, is decidedly bathetic in all its speechifying banality.
