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It’s been a long and strange year and one of the strangest moments came during the summer when a former Co Kildare footballer who is also a dead ringer for at least four people he went to school with became a global heartthrob. All these months later, with the exaggeration of Normal People finally turned off, the great imponderable raised by the series still hangs in the air: was the rise of Paul Mescal real or did we, in our confinement fever, imagine it?
But now the proof finally comes that it actually happened, in the form of a mature new thriller from Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee. The Deceived (Virgin Media, Monday), shot after Normal People, but before Sally Rooney’s adaptation turned Mescal into a Brad Pitt Junior B, is a gripping stunt, constantly bordering on guilty pleasure, but never reaches the edge of the precipice.
It also raises a question we’ve all asked ourselves at one point or another: what if someone made a remake of Rebecca from Daphne du Maurier in rural Donegal?
First the bad news for Mescalitos everywhere. He’s just as charismatic as in Normal People, more so, now that he’s not forced to speak freely about the evils of neoliberalism, but his character is a step above the fringes of the fantastically murky plot.
Paul Mescal on The Deceived: No Sign of His Inner Gauntlet GAA
Mescal plays Sean, a volunteer builder and firefighter in the fictional town of Knockdara in Co Donegal (a nod to Knockdara Park in Derry, where McGee grew up). Tragedy has gripped the town with a fire that partially damaged the town’s manor house and claimed the life of the glamorous proprietary novelist Róisín.
This is obviously a blow to her husband, Michael Callaghan (Emmett J Scanlan), a Cambridge academic with a Dublin accent and a twinkle in his eye. No middle-aged man with a twinkle in her eye can be trusted. And so it is shown when Michael is followed back to Donegal for Róisín’s funeral by her pregnant lover Ophelia (Emily Reid of Belgravia).
Emmett Scanlan on The Deceived.
The Deceived is told from Ophelia’s point of view and soon finds herself replacing Rebecc… sorry Róisín at Knockdara House. A class A chill ensues. Michael asks him to wear one of his late wife’s sweaters (it’s a lovely sweater to be fair). As a bonus, he must dodge the figurative daggers thrown at him by his distrustful mother.
Knockdara is apparently on the other side of the border. But we’re obviously a far cry from McGee’s Derry Girls humor (she wrote The Deceived with her husband Tobias Beer). It is clear from the beginning, for example, that Michael is Ophelia who lights the gas and that there is more to her wife’s death than she is letting on. And what about that sinister tapping behind the door next to your bedroom? Is Róisín approaching Ofelia from beyond? Or is it simply a figment of your guilty imagination? Neither possibility is attractive.
But you don’t care about any of that. What about Mescal, you want to know? Well, it’s low-key magnetic, which will please fans. However, the script doesn’t ask you to summon your inner GAA heartthrob. Some will consider this the disappointment of the season and won’t get over it until Christmas. Others will noticeably forget normal people and enjoy The Deceived for what it is: an overloaded but charming old-school murder mystery.
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