Half Man review: even more devastating than Baby Reindeer

Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson hit on something inescapably human when he penned his gothic horror, the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Both our best selves and the devil on our shoulder can coexist, spectacularly at odds. It’s something Half Man creator Richard Gadd understands innately.

The confessional comedian has borne his battered soul on stages and screens. In Baby Reindeer, Gadd explored both the unhealed wound of sexual assault and a social media-sparked parasocial relationship that bleeds into real life.

That spectacularly successful Netflix series, adapted from his trauma-informed one-man stage show of the same name, proved that true art doesn’t have to make us feel comfortable, take sides and provide easy answers – all while scooping up BAFTAs, Emmies and Globes, oh my!

In this series, the messed-up Donny, unable to get the help he needs, harms his stalker, Jessica Gunning’s tragically toxic Martha, as much as she hurts him (and he hurts himself).

Wowing the world is a doubled-edged sword, though. There’s a lot of pressure on Gadd with Half Man, his sophomore offering as show runner, though it’s a challenge he has embraced, both physically and psychologically, in what proves to be an even wilder beast, thrashing in the murky limbo between heaven and hell.

Complicated love

Opening in the hurly burly of a wedding ceilidh, Half Man casts writer and producer Gadd as hulking brute, Ruben. A giant of a man with a rangy beard and a bowl cut as perturbing as Javier Bardem’s in No Country for Old Men, his glowering eyes intimidate even more than his muscular frame. Rage and darkness seem to broil in his unblinking stare.

Ruben’s Hyde is here for a reckoning with Jamie Bell’s Jekyll, playing his not really brother, Niall. And just like Stevenson’s split personality, neither is entirely innocent in sparking the conflagration that’s about to erupt between them in a blacked-out barn where this non-linear story skulks.

Before we’ve gotten to grips with why they’re writhing in a mess of suffocating violence, we’re thrust back to suburban Glasgow in the 80s.

Ruben’s now played by an equally unnerving Stuart Campbell (SAS Rogue Heroes), with Niall by a permanently blinking in the headlights Mitchell Robertson. The former’s been banged up in the notorious young offenders’ institute, Polmont, and the first Niall hears of his release is when Ruben’s name is called at school.

It’s fairly big news that Niall’s softy softly but kinda shitty mum, Lori (Neve McIntosh), has failed to mention. Neither of their dads are on the scene.

When they get home, Ruben – actually the son of Lori’s not officially out lesbian lover Maura (Marianne McIvor) – is already ripping Niall’s Doctor Who posters off the wall in favour of fit bloke boxers with their taps aff (Glaswegian for ‘tops off’). It’s a hint that Ruben’s knife-carrying toxic masculinity, which both terrifies and tugs at Niall’s confused teenage subservience, is complicated.

Niall dreams of escaping their walking-on-eggshells shared bedroom, but he also enjoys his newfound protection from school bullies, who are way ahead of him on his emerging sexuality (can relate), plus a constant supply of dope.

The scrawnier guy’s peeping tomfoolery, watching his ‘brother’ with girlfriend Mona (Charlotte Blackwood), leads to a three-way with blurred lines of consent that pave the way to future strife.

BDSM tendencies

With his swaggering menace, Campbell is excellent, showing how a history of abuse can conceal a palpable hunger for adoration. Yet it’s the quietly heartbreaking performance of Robertson that really makes these flashback sequences compelling.

In heading to uni halls of residence, Niall is offered a reset. Adopted by boozy roomies Joanna (Julie Cullen) and determined to date ‘porridge’ French emo Celeste (Philippine Velge), he’s instead intrigued by the studiously handsome Alby.

Brilliantly portrayed by Palestinian-Pakistani-British actor Bilal Hasna, he’s a real scene-stealer, with Alby’s level-headed lad taking care of a wasted Naill after a club bender with no strings attached.

Happiness surely awaits?

But that’s not the story Gadd’s here to tell with Half Man, which once more spins a scattered web of co-dependent stickiness. Spun out by Alby’s appeal, a craven Niall falls back, summoning Ruben. He promptly shows up, full of prickling bluster, his slap-happy class consciousness puncturing a privileged bubble. What follows is devastating, causing a fracturing that splinters so many lives.

Gadd’s bristling shared turn as Ruben’s bull that can’t stop wrecking the China shop is astonishing. But, as with the teenage duo, it’s a ring-a-ding Bell who impresses most in the far more frayed adult Niall, the BDSM sub to his dom role in Nymphomaniac. 

Now a struggling writer, Niall’s a sweaty mess of self-loathing and fear of HIV as he spends his nights picking up men in beats and saunas during an extended absence from Ruben, the drug he can’t seem to give up.

A fix is coming, however. Lori again fails to mention until too late that Ruben’s back on the scene and Niall can’t stay away. When Niall confesses he sometimes wishes Ruben would just kill him, Lori, ever-lacking in moral support, offers: ‘He doesn’t need to. You’re doing such a good job of it yourself.’

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A heady brew

As with Baby Reindeer, Half Man spans a torturous tightrope. Gadd again asks us to sympathise with terribly misguided and occasionally terrible (often, in the case of Ruben) people who keep on damaging one another and others.

Editors Rachel Erskine, Berny McGurk and Ben McKinstrie deftly weave the shifting timelines, artfully stitched together by Gadd and Bell, alongside Campbell and Robertson. Russian director Alexandra Brodski and Belgian Eshref Reybrouck split the six bruising episodes, bringing a flinty outsider quality to these broken souls. As do Spanish cinematographer Carlos Catalán and Belgian counterpart Frederic Van Zandycke, all without sacrificing Gadd’s distinctly Scottish voice.

Sure, there’s so much packed into the final ep that it feels a little rushed and a touch unfocused, but it’s forgivable in this butt-heady brew that, if not quite as tight as Baby Reindeer, floors you all the same.

As the so-called brothers’ warped love and loathing for one another lathers up a dangerous eroticism laced with disgust, it leads to a shattering finale all the more awful because it’s inevitable.

If you’re ready to be broken, Half Man proves, once again, that Gadd can dive headlong into the consequences of our darkest impulses, and those inflicted on us by others, without easily retreating to the light, all the while bringing twisted humour to the horror. Like Stevenson’s novel, it’s monstrously good.

Half Man premieres on Stan on 24 April.

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