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The Serpent review – Tahar Rahim shines as ice-cold killer

In American Heiress, his brilliant 2016 book about the Patricia Hearst kidnapping and trial, Jeffrey Toobin makes a clear ideological distinction between the 60s and the 70s, suggesting that the two decades had merged, inaccurately, in the American psyche. “The 1960s were hopeful, the 1970s sour; the 1960s were about success, the 1970s about failure; the 1960s were sporadically violent; the 1970s pervasively violent,” he writes. Any revolutionary optimism certainly had curdled by 1975, when The Serpent (BBC One) kicks off its glossy adventures in murder on the Asian hippie trail. After all, nothing says new year, new you like an intense drama about a brutal serial killer.

“Inspired by true events”, The Serpent tells the story of how Charles Sobhraj, who killed young western travellers in 1975 and 1976, was brought to justice, although justice is light on the ground in this first episode, which concentrates largely on atmosphere. We first meet Sobhraj in 1997, living freely in Paris, as he toys with an American reporter interviewing him. “There are those who would say you got away with it,” she says, as he sits there, impassively.

If that is the central question of The Serpent – Sobhraj’s nickname, because he was so good at slithering away from the law, although it also describes Tahar Rahim’s performance, which is cold-eyed, coiled and ready to pounce on any weakness – then it is not buried under many layers. We are shown that he was able to get away with it because long-distance communication was difficult for travellers at that time; because hippies were dismissed as feckless and irresponsible; because embassies and local authorities appear to have been bad at communicating with each other; and because he was magnetic and convincing – and had the help of his partner, Marie-Andrée Leclerc.

Jenna Coleman plays against her usual warm type as the impenetrable Leclerc, who offers little insight into what is in it for her. Leclerc is an intriguingly mysterious collaborator. Having met a young Dutch couple in Hong Kong, where they are dealing gems, Sobhraj and Leclerc invite the pair to Bangkok to stay at their house and party. The timeline flicks between their meeting, their trip and the investigation carried out by Herman Knippenberg, a junior diplomat at the Dutch embassy, who is determined to find out what happened to them, even though his diplomatic peers have no interest in getting their hands dirty.

This timeline-hopping, frequently explaining that we are either “two months earlier” or “two months later”, is unnecessary and a little confusing. I can see that it is supposed to build tension, dipping back and forth into what happened to the Dutch couple as Knippenberg discovers more about how and why they went missing, but it struggles to maintain the necessary sense of dread, even though we know roughly how it worked out for them from the beginning.

Far better, and more convincing, is the story of the American traveller Theresa, on her way to a Buddhist monastery in Nepal, having one last fling with the wild life before she gets there. Alice Englert, who stood out in Ratched, is impressive as the young woman in whom Sobhraj takes an interest. It is ominous from the moment she appears on screen, merrily seeing off her old life with a final night of parties and sex. “As you know, Americans do not prosper in this part of the world,” Sobhraj lectures her, spitefully, as she makes the terrible mistake of trusting him, for a brief and ultimately tragic moment.

It is excellent at conjuring up an atmosphere, although sometimes at the cost of the story. The heat, the booze and the curfews, the smoking, the sideburns and the suits all come together to cook up a vivid picture of the idealism of those still pursuing the hippie dream well into the sour 70s, and the viciousness with which Sobhraj manipulates and cuts through it. He is able to target these “long-haired bums”, “work-shy hobos” and “stupid fuckin’ hippies” – the Australian attache is particularly frank on that front – because they were vulnerable to a conman and killer like Sobhraj, at that time, in that environment. (The attache is similarly blunt towards poor Knippenberg, or, as he calls him, “ya fuckin’ little mouse with clogs on”). Billy Howle is strong as the harried Dutchman, amid a routinely outstanding cast; Rahim and Coleman are brilliantly chilling.

I am not sure, though, that The Serpent had much else to say. It tells the story, makes Sobhraj’s life look fairly glamorous, amid all that murder, and makes it clear enough that these young people had their futures taken from them in the cruellest of ways. But it is not a whodunnit, nor much of a why-they-dunnit: anyone who knows the story will have some idea of where it lands. It looks the part, and pulls the right strings, but, in the end, it left me a little cold.