Unchosen is set in the world of a Christian splinter sect. Everyone lives simply in grace and harmony, following Christ’s teaching of peace and love for all humankind, with men and women sharing equally in domestic and other labour. They exist as shining lights for what is possible when you set aside the patriarchal nonsense and other accretions that gather around religions. Every episode is a delight and nothing much happens because everyone is living such a good and godly life.
I jest! Unchosen is not here to break new ground. It is here to deliver by-numbers drama that has inexplicably attracted the talented likes of Siobhan Finneran and Christopher Eccleston to its cast and you should proceed with your expectations lowered.
The Fellowship of the Divine is a cult, led by Mr Phillips (Eccleston, who, it strikes me as I watch Mr P deliver his first sermon, is so well suited to playing a cult leader that I have been subconsciously assuming Eccleston must be one in real life, and acting just his side-hustle ever since I first saw him in Cracker). Anyway, in the Fellowship, the women nurture and do as they’re told by the men, and the men pray and provide and tell each other they can do what they want. The sect keeps itself separate from the evil modern world full of “the unchosen”. They have landline phones and electric kettles, but beyond that, technology (“pipelines of pornography and sewage to our souls”) is forbidden.
One day they are all out having a picnic when a big thunderstorm breaks over them. A child, Grace (Olivia Pickering), who is deaf, mistakes the noise for the Rapture and runs off to hide in the woods. Her mother, Rosie (Molly Windsor), disobeys Mr Phillips’s order for the women to stay put while the men search for her and finds Grace drowning in a large pond or small lake (the set-up has been so unconvincing by this point – a sort of Witness-lite relocated to Kent – that it gives you plenty of mental space to parse these things). Just as all hope seems lost, a handsome stranger (Fra Fee) jumps in and saves the child. He is gone by the time Rosie’s husband Adam (Asa Butterfield) and her brother-in-law Isaac (Aston McAuley) get there. An ambulance is required for Grace and after a moment’s hesitation Isaac pulls a smartphone from his homemade trousers and makes the call.
Oh dear, oh dear.
We know Adam is definitely a bad ’un because he exercises his marital rights even when Rosie is clearly not in the mood, so it comes as no surprise when he publicly denounces his brother to the Fellowship for owning a pipeline to pornography. Isaac is shunned and locked in a bedroom while his wife, Hannah (Alexa Davies), goes into labour and has child number 72. Bad Adam is rewarded for his loyalty by being made an Elder.
Meanwhile, Rosie is having increasingly vivid fantasies about the handsome stranger. This state of affairs is not helped when he comes to her door, saying his name is Sam and begging for help as he has nowhere to go and no one to turn to. She tends the wound Sam says he got rescuing Grace and parks him in the chicken coop overnight, where he starts to get the flashbacks to priests, prison and – uh – a fish factory that tell us our injured hero might have a backstory that should concern Rosie, however hot he is compared with her nasty little squit of a husband. Rosie is increasingly closely watched by Mrs Phillips (Finneran), who sits somewhere between a Nurse Ratched and Mother Superior but nurses a semi-secret sorrow that may yet be the dramatic making of her.
Things go from bad to worse as yearnings build, power corrupts, depravities are uncovered and escape attempts have to be made – which could be quite thrilling if the script were more than workmanlike (“Regulations are the word of God. Even when the heart says otherwise,” and so on) and the characters more than chess pieces. It’s entertaining enough, undemanding fare, but you might wish you had chosen other ways to spend your four hours.
