Landscapers Is A Meditation Of Multiple Realities

Not being loved, especially by your parents, can mess you up in ways one can never comprehend. Ask Susan Edwards of London. She's still alive but in prison. Landscapers is a dramatization of a true-crime story, told not from the standpoint of the victims but from the culprits, who to this day maintain their innocence yet are spending the rest of their lives behind bars. In 2014, Susan Edwards and her husband Christopher Edwards were convicted of a double-murder of Susan's parents, Patricia and William Wycherley and sentenced to a minimum 25 years of prison life. The court, the jury, the law and the officials, all were of the opinion that what the two did was highly insensitive and cruel. But if I had parents like Susan's, I am not sure if I would have been able to maintain my sanity either.

15 years ago in May 1998, Susan visited her parents in Mansfield over a weekend. In the night, while she was sleeping upstairs, Patrica killed William over an argument she had wanted to end forever. She told Susan that she hated the man who had ruined her life. Then she said certain emotionally explicit things to Susan that provoked her to shoot Patricia, twice. The next weekend, Susan along with Christopher this time, revisited her parents' home and buried the dead bodies in the backyard garden. For the next 15 years, they lived peacefully until eventually, they surrendered themselves to the police. The mini-series does not try to take a side and refrain from making any kind of decisive judgement. It does not even focus much on the case itself. Creator Ed Sinclair instead tries to explore the emotional relationship between the elderly couple and the complexities that led to such a situation in the first place.

What the show really unfolds through its four episodes is not the dark and malicious side to the elderly couple but an undying and boundless love story between two timeless lovers. Susan and Christopher met through an online dating app and instantly took a liking for each other. Susan's past was not filled with happy and joyful memories. After years of being berated and unloved by her parents, when she finally met Chris, she found in him her knight in shining armour who came to rescue her from all the problems of the world and give her the love she rightly deserved. The love shared by the two is so deep that they are ready to beg for each other, eat a croissant out of a dustbin, take a bullet and even shoot someone if necessary. They do not fit into the general definition of love because they don't just love or care about each other but they also protect and breathe for one another. For the two of them, there are no boundaries that they won't cross for each other's sake.

Susan, played by Olivia Colman, is a bit odd and deeply fragile. She is a mad fan of Gary Cooper,  famous for starring in western movies in the 50s. Her life is greatly influenced by this man and she often imagines herself in a story similar to one of his movies. Director Will Sharpe made the most of this real knowledge and created a unique and refreshing style of directing. He makes use of black and white frames to depict the fantasy Susan lives in and while jumping in and out of flashbacks, he uses red, green and blue colours to signify the myriad of feelings Susan and her husband Christopher have gone through. Most importantly, from the beginning, he blurs tiny bits of frames on each end as if to express the uncertainty of the truth behind this story.

Love is a weird thing. And parental love is the most complex form of it. For parents, a child is a bundle of joy and also a burden for a lifetime. Sometimes, the child is the reason behind some parents' fulfilled dreams and sometimes he is the reason behind their sacrificed futures. And this dual nature of emotions has the power to culminate into an insufferable string of lifetime regrets. And when it all comes out in the end, something fatal is sure to happen. Susan's parents thought of her as a mistake and told her she was impossible to love. They stole from her and manipulated her. They gave her years of suffering and trauma that she never managed to process on her own. So when Chris came along and she saw a faint hope of living the life of her dreams and her parents tried to take that away from her too, she or rather Christopher did the only thing that could have assured their happy life. It would be harsh to judge Susan for what she did. Because we will never know what she went through until we walk in her shoes. Till then, we can only think of Susan as an ardent cinema lover, who refused to let anyone take the driving seat in her own life.