Part detective show, part journey into the dark corners of a man’s heart, Luther is a magnificent piece of television. Starring Idris Elba as the titular Luther, a cop who isn’t adverse to a bit of violence to get the job done, he’s ably matched by his antagonist, Alice, a sociopathic killer played with gleeful menace by Ruth Wilson. Gritty, mired in shadow, Luther follows our tortured hero as he stumbles behind the debris left by killers, his own humanity dwindling as he falls further into the psyches of the murderers he pursues.

The visual style of Luther is arresting, with a lot of strange camera angles and non-traditional framing of the subject of the shot. Sorry to sound a bit technical, but I really loved how in the first season, Luther was often framed in the bottom right hand corner of the shot, the complete antithesis of the traditional framing of the main character of a show. From this, can we extrapolate that Luther is himself not a hero, instead a man worn down by the constant muck he must wade through? Or is it just the director thought it would be really cool to frame the shot that way? Who knows?? 😉

The third series is out soon and the BBC have just released a trailer – witness the cool: