‘Nothing can come close to the damage that I’ve unleashed on myself…’
Baby Reindeer was a TV phenomenon upon release back in 2024 and it introduced writer and star Richard Gadd as an exciting new face on the televisual landscape. How the hell do you follow that? Well, in Gadd’s case, you double down on the confessional storytelling, the commentary on toxic masculinity and the nihilistic characters and hope that your audience comes along with you…
Half Man presents us with two men who meet as teenage boys when their mothers begin a relationship and then become intrinsically linked throughout the rest of their lives. Niall (Jamie Bell as an adult and Mitchell Robertson in flashback) is a timid but intelligent boy who is bullied by his peers and struggles to fit in. Ruben (Gadd and Stuart Campbell), his de facto step brother, is confident, assured and prone to violent outbursts. The two begin a toxic co-dependency that threatens to strangle the life out of both of them.
I must begin by talking about Ruben Pallister. Whether portrayed by Gadd or Campbell (both are superb), Ruben is a new byword for toxic masculinity. Protective and affectionate one minute and seething with rage the next, the fact that everyone has met a Ruben Pallister at some point in their lives points to Gadd’s ability to craft well drawn and familiar characters without resorting to cliche. Bell, a courageous performer who has plumbed these depths before, most notably in the Irvine Welsh adaptation Filth, matches Gadd every step of the way, and every scene they share crackles with barely repressed tension and unspoken menace. The violence, as in life, is sudden, sometimes seemingly unprovoked, and always shocking, but Half Man, for all its bombast, never feels like it is being shocking for the sake of it.
Some will find Gadd’s sophomore effort simply too much to stomach, and I’ll admit that the constant gloom that pervades these six episodes does become a little repetitive, but his insistence on making all of his characters morally ambiguous, coupled with his flair for storytelling and ability to write compelling dialogue ensures that Half Man is almost as good as its predecessor. Hard hitting doesn’t even begin to cover it.
