Anna Maxwell Martin stars as Delia Balmer, the London nurse who endured four years of escalating violence from carpenter John Sweener, Shaun Evans, before he almost murdered her outside her Hampstead flat in 1994 while on bail for earlier assaults. The four-parter, adapted by Nick Stevens from Balmer’s memoir Living with a Serial Killer, opens with the couple’s meeting in 1986 and ends with Sweeney’s belated 2011 conviction for the Amsterdam murder of his former wife, Paula Fields, whose dismembered body was found in the city’s canals in 1990. Between those points, the drama charts repeated police failures: officers dismissed Balmer’s 1990 complaint as a “domestic”, lost photographic evidence of her injuries and released Sweeney without charge after he boasted of cutting up bodies. Julia Ford directs with a plain, almost procedural style that lets the institutional indifference speak for itself; Carly Paradis’s score keeps returning to the same three-note piano motif, like a panic attack that refuses to subside. The final episode flips structure entirely: Balmer, now relocated and working under another name, watches from the public gallery as prosecutors use her testimony to secure a life sentence, the camera holding on her bruised face until the forewoman delivers the verdict. Reactions were uniform: The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan awarded five stars, while Rotten Tomatoes logged a 100 per cent rating and Metacritic tallied 82 from six critics, making it one of ITV’s most praised limited series since Longford in 2006.
Production Details
ITV1 / 1 Season / 4 Episodes / 2024
Created by: Nick Stevens
Showrunner(s): Simon Heath, Nick Stevens, Lucy Roch
Writer(s): Nick Stevens
Producer(s): Ken Horn
Cinematography: Sam Thomas
Music: Carly Paradis
Main Cast
Anna Maxwell Martin as Delia Balmer
Shaun Evans as John Sweeney
Amanda Wilkin as Leah
Mitchell Mullen as Jack Halstead
Jack Franklin as Joshua Wilson
Sallie Harmsen as Astrid De Vries
Cory English as Stewart Balmer
Alice Barclay as Mrs. Wilson
Stephanie Street as Janice Rainsworth
Sophie Ford as Imelda Dunning
William Brand as Inspector Stilma
Lucy Thackeray as WPC Jane Barker
