Based on novelist Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel, filmmaker Julian Farino’s PBS-aired adaptation boasts formidable star power in Benedict Cumberbatch and Kelly Macdonald, playing a couple split apart by the abduction of their daughter, who disappears one day in the supermarket while her father blithely goes about his business at the checkout. Cumberbatch’s character Stephen is a children’s book author who spends years looking for his lost child Kate, whereas his best friend Charles (Stephen Campbell Moore) is searching for a different kind of child—his inner child. Charles is a powerful political figure and publisher who eventually retires to the countryside and proceeds to crack up, reverting back to his childhood instincts and running like a crazed lunatic around the forest outside his country house in a descent into primal madness. Of course this wouldn’t be a McEwan story without a few unnecessarily morbid twists and a pitch-black sense of humor (when there is any humor at all). Cumberbatch and Macdonald turn in fine performances in this typical McEwan landscape: an upper-crust world where human irrationality and psychosis is the norm. Recommended. (M. Sandlin)
The Child in Time
PBS, 90 min., not rated, DVD: $24.99 Volume 33, Issue 4
The Child in Time
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