Half Man review: Baby Reindeer creator's violent new series is a brutal 'conversation starter' ★★★★☆

Two years ago, Richard Gadd had a surprise TV hit with his autobiographical Netflix drama about being stalked. This follow-up about two step-brothers is equally shocking.

In Richard Gadd's follow up to his galvanising Netflix hit Baby Reindeer, the character he plays roars on to the screen, a glaring, fearsome hulk of a man ready to explode with rage. Ruben arrives as an uninvited guest disrupting his brother's wedding at a Scottish farm, and from the opening scene to the very end Half Man is almost unbearably intense. We wait every minute for Ruben to lash out in violence, which he does more than once.  

Gadd created, wrote and stars in Half Man, as he did in the autobiographical Baby Reindeer, where his character was the victim of stalking and sexual abuse. In many ways the new series is different. It is not autobiographical and this time Gadd plays the tormentor. Owing to their mothers being in a relationship, Ruben and Niall (Jamie Bell) were raised as brothers since adolescence. Each episode moves the wedding forward, while flashing back to follow their destructive codependent relationship. It starts in the late 1980s when Niall is 15, meek and bullied at school, and Ruben, 17, returns from a young offender's institution having bitten off another boy's nose. Their lives unravel, but not all at once.

But Half Man is just as brash and singular as Baby Reindeer. It shares themes with that surprise hit and is also likely to be a conversation-starter. Once more Gadd offers a painstaking exploration of masculine identity, violence and reluctance to accept one's sexual identity. That violence is graphic enough to make the characters' emotional traumas feel visceral.  

Gadd, as the belligerent, troubled Ruben, and Bell, as the confused brother who worships and fears him, are thoroughly convincing in their complexity. And the young actors who play the teenage versions of them, Stuart Campbell and Mitchell Robertson, are shockingly great discoveries. 

As a writer, Gadd never softens our view of Ruben's damaging behaviour. In an especially queasy scene Ruben introduces the teenage Niall to sex, crossing all sorts of lines. He later visits Niall at university, where a brutal beating changes their lives. He coerces and threatens him as an adult. We come to see that both men are victims of emotional damage. And in adulthood – through love, death and tangles with the law – both of them lie, betray and inflict cruelty all around.

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Gadd orchestrates the characters' backgrounds a bit too neatly as he grapples with his major theme of male identity. Neither Ruben nor Niall had a suitable father figure, and Ruben emerged with a warped sense of manhood. In turn, he becomes Niall's model, even though that version of masculinity goes against Niall's sense of himself. In his wrenching performance, Bell displays just how emotionally tortured Niall is.

Half Man may bring to mind the brilliant series Adolescence, also about masculine identity. But Adolescence is chilling because the violent boy at its centre is so ordinary. Ruben and Niall are far more particular and extreme. Even when the characters are unrelatable, though, Gadd's power as a writer comes through. He doesn't ask for pity for these damaged men. He successfully asks for understanding and sympathy, and does that in his distinct, jolting, culturally resonant voice.

Half Man premieres in the US on 23 April on HBO and HBO Max, and in the UK on 24 April on BBC iPlayer.

★★★★☆

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