New drama Curfew (Paramount+) is a thriller based on an intriguing idea. What would life be like if men had to stay indoors between the hours of 7pm and 7am?
It is set in a fictional version of Britain, one so removed from our current reality that if you’re a man who steps outside the house at night you will receive a mandatory two-year prison sentence, but one that also still has Jeremy Vine’s Channel 5 talk show on which to discuss whether this law is a bit much. Paramount is the parent company of Channel 5, hence the cross-promotion, and we should expect Curfew to appear on the latter at some point.
This is the set-up: in an effort to safeguard women, all men and boys over the age of 10 are fitted with an electronic tag. If they break curfew, police vans instantly arrive on the scene to arrest them. The police are able to respond as efficiently as this because they have nothing else to do: crimes against women have disappeared, and presumably rates of burglary, mugging and murder have also plummeted to near zero.
The story is adapted from the novel After Dark by Jayne Cowie, but the idea of a male curfew is one of those talking points that is discussed periodically, most recently after the murder of Sarah Everard. Wouldn’t it be amazing, the argument goes, for women to be able to walk home in the dark without worrying about being attacked by a stranger? To go out at night wearing whatever one likes and not face being catcalled, groped or worse?
Curfew has imagined this happening, but without fully realising the world it has created. Even outlandish ideas need to have some kind of internal logic. What happens to men who work late, or has the nation’s productivity been allowed to fall off a cliff? How do people date? Can husbands and wives go out for dinner? Surely it would be annoyingly impractical for a woman if she could never send her partner out at night to buy a pint of milk, or pick up the kids after dark?
And – here’s the big one, which this drama completely fails to address – how has the male population rolled over and accepted this, bar a few half-hearted demonstrations and the establishment of a “terrorist organisation” called Men’s Liberation Now? Not only are they barred from going outside, but men must be approved by the authorities before moving in with a partner, submitting to an assessment in the hope of being granted a cohabitation certificate. The amount of government red tape involved here must be staggering.
The low-budget tone is The Handmaid’s Tale meets Hollyoaks. Sarah Parish, who has clearly been taking notes from Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown, is a tough detective mourning the loss of her daughter – the last young woman to be killed by a man in Britain, 48 hours before the curfew was imposed. When another woman is murdered, Parish is adamant that the killer was male: “That level of rage? Only a man could have done that.” But everyone else insists that her theory is wrong, because any men in the area would have been detected.
So we’re in whodunit territory, with Mandip Gill (a former Doctor Who companion) as the main suspect. It held my interest just enough to make me want to see the end and find out who the killer is, but not enough to watch the episodes in between.