CW for discussions of racism, coercive control, and sexual violence
A hero, vested with the authority of the law, doggedly pursues every lead that comes their way. With methodical tenacity, they unravel a web of lies to uncover the moral transgression at the centre of the plot. Truth is established, the guilty are punished, and order is restored. Details vary, but a basic structure persists: the detective drama formula has long been a mainstay of television. The BBC’s new drama, The Girl Before, reformulates this basic structure, but with a new intent: it attempts to speak into being a feminist crime story. With two Black women as its heroines, the drama takes the conventions of the detective drama in new directions.
The show unfolds in two parallel narrative timelines, following two women living at different times in the same, ultra-modernist smart home. Both women, Emma and Jane, have recently suffered trauma, and both enter into identical relationships with the house’s architect, the enigmatic and controlling Edward Monkford. As it transpires that Emma died in the house, it is up to Jane to unravel the events that led up to her death, discover whether Edward was implicated, and avoid the same fate herself. While at times the script can be overwrought, throwing in twists and turns seemingly for their own sake, the show’s close psychological study of its characters creates a real sense of menace that cuts through its melodramatic tendencies.
In recent years, the founding assumptions of the detective show format have found themselves on shaky ground. After the reckoning of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, The automatic faith that the mainstream British public once held in the institution of policing has been undermined – a faith which many of these shows rely upon to function as drama. It can no longer be assumed that the hero’s uniform is a signifier of their virtue. The archetype of the noble, neutral police officer committed to the pursuit of truth has been undermined by mainstream recognition of police brutality and institutional racism. As such, the form of the detective drama has been confronted with accusations of being little more than propaganda, manufacturing consent for the violent policing of marginalised communities. The Girl Before places limited trust in the police: while the officers are not outright malicious, it is clear they have their own agenda. Career progression is prioritised above the wellbeing of victims, and truth is sidelined in favour of a convenient conviction.
Instead, it is the heroine Jane, a lawyer reeling from a recent miscarriage, who must discern the events leading up to the crime. Jane lacks the institutional power and detached retrospective viewpoint of a conventional detective, investigating a crime after it has happened. She is vulnerable, implicated, living in the same house as the victim, and in an eerily identical relationship with the same man. She is compelled not only to establish truth, but to save herself. The drama does not wholeheartedly attempt to democratise the figure of the detective: as a lawyer Jane still has some legal authority in her sleuthing capacity, which gains her access to information and witnesses that another woman might not be granted. It is the successful legal professional, not the floundering marketing assistant Emma, who is granted authority to direct the untangling of the narrative’s web. But nonetheless, The Girl Before is significant in its transformation of the victim into the detective. Jane does not passively suffer for the audience’s gratification, but is granted the capability to save herself and find the truth about Emma’s death.
But the nature of truth, and the issue of its public demonstrability in the eyes of the jury and the audience, is also a problem for The Girl Before. The crime at the centre of the show – the death of Emma – occurs within a private home, in the context of escalating tensions in her relationships. The show grapples with the implications of coercive control, criminalised in 2015, and how this challenges our conceptions of crime and justice. Coercive control laws criminalise abusive behaviour in relationships beyond physical violence. Verbal and emotional abuse, isolating or surveilling a partner, and controlling a partner’s finances can all become criminal acts under this legislation. Traditionally, crime is conceptualised as a public problem: criminals are dangers to society, and need to be punished by the law. But the introduction of coercive control as a crime problematises this by turning our most intimate relationships into potential crime scenes. The private spaces of the home, often considered personal and outside the scrutiny of the law, are suddenly brought into sharp, critical focus.
The criminalisation of coercive control has doubtless given protection to countless survivors of domestic abuse. But The Girl Before, with its lingering external shots through the glass walls of the heroines’ home, seems to implicitly ask what the cost might be of the entry of the justice system into women’s private lives. The sense of menace in the show is heightened by the omnipresent surveillance technology in their home, rigged as it is with cameras, microphones, and a digital assistant in every room, and sensors collecting data from the kitchen to the shower. But we, as viewers, also become an intrusive gaze in the women’s private spaces. Invested as the audience is in the revelation of the crime, and thus implicitly aligned with the sleuth, we too surveil the heroines as they inhabit their private spaces, in order to understand their fate, to form their lives into a comprehensible, familiar narrative of victimisation and violence. Our own gaze, conditioned by the formula of the detective show to expect bloodshed and then punishment, to critically and intrusively survey a woman’s life, is complicit in the violence visited upon Emma.
At the conclusion of The Girl Before, there are not one but three guilty men. Emma’s boss and rapist is arrested, her controlling ex-boyfriend Si is accidentally killed in an altercation with Jane, and Edward goes to therapy in an attempt to confront his controlling compulsions in his personal relationships. The show does not entirely divest from the law as a means to impart justice, as the arrest shows, but it does broaden its scope to consider other responses to crime. The death of Si is perversely satisfying, but its accidental nature sidesteps the problem of disciplinary violence. The show’s restorative justice approach to Edward’s transgressions was the most interesting to me, in how it navigates problems of authority. He turns to therapy to work out the emotional problems that lead to his controlling behaviour, and the show suggests he might be rehabilitated. But the therapist herself is hardly a neutral party: she was Emma’s therapist, and subsequently helped Jane’s investigation by revealing tantalising tidbits of information that her duty of confidentiality allowed. The therapist is thus not entirely separate from the process of sleuthing that leads to punitive justice. Her implication in the show’s spectacle of disciplinary investigation means that restorative justice never becomes separate from the punitive work of the legal system. Edward’s therapy also functions as confession: he submits to the therapist’s authority in order to receive punishment and absolution.
The Girl Before is compelling, if at times it stretched my capacity to suspend disbelief. It is speculative and thoughtful in its attempts to reform the genre of the detective thriller, but it never becomes radical, remaining invested in conventional notions of authority, revelation, and punishment. Our detective is not a police officer, but is still a legal professional, and deploys her class-based privileges to unravel the truth about Emma. It is the police who punish Emma’s attacker. And the possibility of restorative justice is never completely uncoupled from the public desire for punishment. This feminist crime story is imaginative, but never truly subverts the problematic notions of truth and justice that pervades its genre.
Image Credit: Wang Sum Luk
