White House Farm is one of those crime dramas that made me deeply uncomfortable, perhaps because family murders are the ones I find most disturbing — and even more so when they are based on a true story. There is something particularly difficult about knowing that behind the performances were real people, real relationships and a real family home.
What stayed with me most, though, is that White House Farm is not really about the murder itself. The murder almost becomes the background. The real story is what surrounds it: the family dynamics, the behaviour after the deaths, the suspicion, the lies and the gradual unravelling of what happened inside that house.
This was also my first encounter with Freddie Fox, whose Jeremy Bamber I found incredibly unsettling. There is something difficult to read in his performance — charm mixed with detachment and calculation. When I later saw him in Slow Horses, I immediately recognised him, even though he had stepped into a completely different kind of character.
And unusually for Mapped in Drama, the landscape has almost no role to play, White House Farm does not need its landscape. There are no green forests, dramatic rivers or snowy mountains fighting to become another character in the story. The Essex countryside remains firmly in the background.
There is simply no need for anything else to compete for our attention.
The family, the farmhouse and the knowledge that this really happened are disturbing enough.
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