Possession: Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars in powerful Jamaica-set drama

“Like many a gothic thriller”, “Possession” on Sky Atlantic “is set around a creepy old house”, said Barbara Ellen in The Observer. The difference is that this one stands on the site of a former slave plantation in Jamaica. Its owner has died and has cut his only son, Oliver (Jonny Lee Miller), out of his will, and left his £50m estate to a near stranger – a local named Cudjoe East (Sheldon Shepherd).

British lawyer Claudia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is sent out by her firm to resolve the situation, partly because she has a Jamaican mother. She assumes that Cudjoe will turn out to be a simple fraudster, but things turn out to be stranger than anticipated.

“What follows is a dual-timeline mystery,” said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. One strand unfolds in the present day; the other takes us back to the 1700s, when the estate was worked by enslaved people under the “increasingly cruel” rule of Oliver’s ancestors.

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Cudjoe claims to be 292 years old, and one of those people. Images from Claudia’s own nightmares start appearing in real life, and the spirits believed by locals to infuse the land grow increasingly restless.

Some may find the resort to the paranormal a cop-out, but ultimately, this is a powerful drama about unadmitted guilt, and whether justice for some crimes is possible. Via the £50m legacy, the series, which boasts some fine performances, addresses the issue of reparations for slavery, said Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. It is a worthy one, so it is a pity that in the midst of this, some of “the horror scenes can come over as unintentionally funny”.