Summerwater review – back out of the room slowly and carefully … this bleak drama is a mess

<p>This six-part adaptation of Sarah Moss’s novel is deeply confused. The acting is melodramatic, the tone bewildering and the plot is full of cartoonishly grim situations that go nowhere</p><p>Holidays can be murder. Regular domestic life often smothers a festering seam of incompatibility in a relationship, or a fault in an outwardly solid family dynamic. But trap people together for a week or two somewhere far away and there’s nowhere to hide. In Summerwater, a forbiddingly bleak drama written by John Donnelly and based on Sarah Moss’s novel, each of the six rain-lashed lochside cabins contains a uniquely unhappy household-on-holiday that is, on one particular day, about to endure a reckoning.</p><p>We start, as far too many dramas do, with characters being interviewed in the near future by the police. There has been a fire, but we won’t know who started it, whose cabin it was in and who died until episode six. In between is an interlinked anthology, the same day seen again and again from different perspectives. First we shadow Justine (Valene Kane), a wife and mother of two preteens.</p><p>Summerwater is on Channel 4 now.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/nov/16/summerwater-review-sarah-moss-novel-adaptation-channel-4">Continue reading...</a>