DISCLOSURE: I'm a friend of a cast member, so I must recuse myself from giving a rating and instead, I'll submit a brief interpretation.
"Fear is something horrible, an atrocious sensation, a sort of decomposition of
the soul," (Guy de Maupassant, 'Le Peur' 1882).
A bustling, vibrant metropolis, eerily, unnervingly quiet; these are the opening images that lead us into the surreal paranoid world of London and the UK under Lockdown. We are introduced to the characters who fear for loved ones, for their lives, for their uncertain futures. All they know is that they have no control or power over unseen and unforeseeable events.
Against this background, a serial killer has emerged, elusive in the extreme; not only are they no signs of break-ins, there are no forensic clues at all. To compound the mystery, the detective assigned to the case is herself under quarantine, waiting for test results to see if she is infected.
The unknown unseen killer could represent COVID and how easily it can be transmitted. We sense the alienation and impotence of the characters, lacking the support of friends, family and institutions. Everyone is alone and vulnerable and the deaths are the personification of extreme paranoia in extreme circumstances. We are not scared of what we know, but of what we don't know.
'The Lockdown Hauntings' is a valuable source for how people lived and felt in the early 2020s as even at time of writing, we don't know if the vaccines work (solve the case) or if new mutant variants will arise ...
