The three-part miniseries The Witness is available to stream on Netflix now.
Netflix’s new true crime miniseries The Witness retells the real-life murder of Rachel Nickell in London in 1992, which was a widely publicized story in Britain. The elements involved here – equal parts wrenching and compelling in terms of the aftermath of what occurred – certainly make for an involving series, even if it doesn’t quite tie together everything it feels like it’s trying for.
A veteran of British crime dramas like The Victim and Chasing Shadows, Rob Williams wrote The Witness (with Alex Winckler directing the three episodes) using Alex Hanscombe’s memoir, Letting Go, as the main source material. Alex is The Witness’s title character, a boy who is just three years old when his mother Rachel (Eleanor Williams) is horrifically raped and murdered in front of him during a walk through a park. With no DNA or fingerprints found at the scene of the crime, Alex (played as a 3-year-old by Jahsaiah Williams) is the only one who can give investigators any information to go on, but his incredibly young age makes this a daunting and emotionally precarious process.
Trying to deal with all of this is Alex’s father, André (Jordan Bolger), who’s left juggling his own immense grief and wish to protect his son from more trauma with the push to get Alex to talk about what happened. It’s an impossible situation, and there are strong and effective scenes early on as André must navigate whether having Alex talk about these things can actually help him process what he went through versus simply giving the police what they want, regardless of what it does to the boy.
Best known for playing youthful roles in series like Peaky Blinders and The Book of Boba Fett, Bolger is excellent in The Witness as André. He wears his character’s mixture of sadness and frustration on his face, even as we see him do his best to push through and give Alex some sort of normal life, which becomes increasingly difficult thanks to the massive media attention they attract wherever they go.
The Witness takes place in two time periods, including the murder and initial investigation in 1992-1994, and then a decade later when André and Alex, now living in Spain, are informed the case is being reopened thanks to an advancement in DNA matching techniques. Kudos to both Bolger’s performance and to the hair and makeup teams for selling him at different points of André’s life, in a story that ultimately spans 14 years. Much of the story jumps back and forth between the two time periods and Winckler does a very good job of visually differentiating the eras so it’s almost always immediately clear which portion we’re now back in.
That being said, it’s hard not to wonder if telling this story in a more linear fashion might not have been just as effective, as it feels like the cross-cutting is sometimes a bit of a distracting, unnecessary technique. But at least it does allow us to meet the teenage version of Alex earlier, with Max Finchman also very good as a kid who has, not shockingly given all he’s gone through, grown up with some self-destructive tendencies. A complex aspect of all of this is that Alex’s lashing out has been perhaps given an extra boost unwittingly by André, whose desperation to keep their identity a secret in other countries, lest the media learn where they are, has them living with a go bag packed with money and passports by the door, as though they’re criminals on the run.
A talented cast of British character actors like Neil Maskell, Kevin Eldon, Sean Gilder, James Bradshaw and James Dryden offer solid, engaging performances as the men leading the investigation into Rachel’s death in the ’90s, with Mark Stanley then grabbing the baton for the portion set in the 2000s. There are some moments in the series that are certainly heavy-handed, such as André watching a psychologist on TV talk about the lifelong trauma Alex will likely feel, but the cast do a lot to keep the story grounded, even when it briefly threatens to feel a bit more sensationalized.
The third and final episode of The Witness jams in a lot, including the reopening of the case, the possibility of seeing the killer (Steve Stamp) in a more sympathetic light based on his own disturbing history, and discussion of huge errors on the part of the police going back to before Rachel’s murder even occurred. All of these aspects are compelling, particularly the unexpected empathy towards the killer in a story of this sort (and who it is who’s seeing them in this different manner). Yet it also feels somewhat rushed through and ultimately as though The Witness could actually have used one more episode to help flesh out some of what is being conveyed here.
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