You Don't Know Me episode 2 review

Still catching up on You Don’t Know Me episode 2? Read Steve’s review of episode 1 here.

Firing your barrister in order to give your own closing speech during a trial to determine if you’re going to spend decades in prison for murder… It’s a bold move. Using that time to address the jury directly and tell them the exhaustive back story to the case to the near-constant ire of the prosecution and judge? Well, that’s about as gutsy as it gets.

Admitting to the twelve jurors that you went out and bought a gun and shot someone while trying to convince them that you didn’t shoot someone else? Ay, ay, ay. That’s just reckless.

That’s what our main main ‘Hero’ (Samuel Adewunmi) does here, though. Alright, so You Don’t Know Me slightly pushes its luck in terms of what would likely be allowed in a courtroom. Got an objection? OVERRULED.

Hero’s long and winding tale is a risky one as it paints him as a good man, but one prepared to break the law. The jury discovers this when he tells them how he gunned down a pimp to free his girlfriend Kyra and then set up local dealer Jamil to get killed by the gang that forced her onto the streets. The man takes chances.

They also see his human side – and why the prosecution’s evidence is based on false pretences – when he explains how his hair got into the victim’s car. Jamil and his boys, surviving the attack from the Glocks, put Hero in Jamil’s car and took him for a drive. Which is where the end of episode 2 left him.

This smart and thought-provoking courtroom drama has been well received by audiences and critics so far. Rightly so too. The marketing from the BBC hasn’t exactly been aggressive, so it’s doubtful it’s pulling in the audience of other shows that have shared its time slot like Vigil, and of course no dramas compete with Line of Duty for numbers. You Don’t Know Me isn’t watercooler chat fodder for the masses yet. But it is vital.

The assured, unapologetic and yet subtle way it presents its main themes deserves praise. With inferior source material, more unfocused screenwriting and less confident directing, this four-part drama could well have been heavy handed. It isn’t, though. As such it delivers its message powerfully but precisely. Author Imran Mahmood, writer Tom Edge and director Sam Masud – rightfully – take most of the plaudits.

One line, delivered by Kyra as she explained her decision to work on the streets for the gang that’s threatening her brother’s life, hits hard. ‘You are only a good person because your life has let you live that way,’ she tells Hero. She’s telling him not to judge her brother for his drug dealing. He and Kyra didn’t have the upbringing, the family or the love that Hero did growing up. It’s a line delivered between characters, but aimed squarely at everyone watching at home.

There’s a lot to like about You Don’t Know Me, but what this will likely be remembered as is Samuel Adewunmi’s breakthrough. He had a decent part in the recent Angela Black on ITV, but this has allowed him to show range and prove himself as a leading man. You could easily see Adewunmi following the likes of Daniel Kaluuya and Jack O’Connell and transitioning from British TV to Hollywood.

At the halfway stage there’s still so much of the story to tell and so much to find out, although we suspect we may still be left without a definitive conclusion. We don’t mind that, though. Life isn’t always that clear. And good art is always ambiguous.

You Don't Know Me episode 3 review

Some spoilers for You Don’t Know Me episode 3 below. Still catching up? Read Steve’s review of episode 2 here.

At the end of episode 2 of BBC One’s latest Sunday night crime thriller You Don’t Know Me, we left our hero, ‘Hero’, in the back of Jamil’s car after the botched shooting attempt. With a bag over his head, things didn’t look good.

They didn’t get much better for him, either. Although Samuel Adewunmi’s character survived the showdown – we kind of knew he would, given this is all a retelling of the story from the courtroom – more trouble was ahead. Hero got to see a wider view of the food chain. His antics with Kyra and the Glocks may be losing Jamil money, but worse than that, it means it’s costing the man above Jamil in the drug-peddling pecking order money. An altogether scarier man.

That man was ‘Face’ (Michael Balogun, War of the Worlds). With surprising politeness, but intense menace, he laid out the situation for our main character. To keep a lid on the situation and keep him, Kyra, his mum and sister Bless safe, Hero needs to come up with money. And fast.

Seemingly, the man’s not on a huge commission at work. So selling a few Corsas and an A4 isn’t going to solve it. A plan needed to be hatched to raise money and distract Jamil and Face. Enter Curt.

Just as it looked as if Hero was fresh of ideas, luck and friends, a blast from the past strolls in. His old school friend Curt (Tuwaine Barrett, Blue Story) – a gentle giant who’s mixed up with the Glocks but looking for a way out. He’d heard about Hero’s predicament and was keen to help out.

This third instalment of You Don’t Know Me aired ten minutes later than scheduled because of Boris Johnson’s impromptu plea for the country to get boosted. Someone else about to get boosted was Roger Jean Nsengiyumva’s Jamil.

A plan was hatched. A set-up. A drug deal that’d outsmart Jamil, and put our protagonist on top. It went south, though – as all drug deals tend to on TV and in films. A fight broke out between the two sides, with Kyra and Bless caught up. A gun went off, Jamil hit the deck. He’d been shot, he’s dead. And Kyra pulled the trigger…

So that’s that, then? Well, no. We’re only at episode 3, remember? Turns out he wasn’t really dead. Which complicates matters somewhat. And makes Jamil some sort of south London Michael Myers.

It was a tense stand-off and the highlight of this third part. The tension was seriously ramped up in these flashbacks scenes. As for the ‘present day’ courtroom stuff? Well, the whole set-up is based around this closing speech idea that, spanning the narrative now of three hours of drama, is pushing its luck somewhat in terms of realism. In terms of critiques, though, it’s a very minor one. This is quality drama.

As for scale, four parts feel right here. This penultimate slice kept the plot ticking along, with Monday night’s finale able to close things off. Any longer and it might’ve felt like padding. As things are, it’s all set up nicely for a conclusion.

Is Hero telling the truth about the shooting? If so, who really killed Jamil? Is Kyra safe? What will happen to our main man…? Here’s hoping we find out the answers to at least some of those questions.

You Don't Know Me episode 4 review

Some spoilers for You Don’t Know Me episode 4 below. Still catching up? Read Steve’s review of episode 3 here.

‘The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.’
― Milan Kundera

There’s no more pretentious way to start a review than with a fancy quote from a highbrow literary figure, is there? It makes both the writer and reader simultaneously feel rather clever and more than a little pompous. Still, as this is our final review of BBC One’s excellent four-parter You Don’t Know Me, we thought we’d treat ourselves.

Great art should leave you with questions, it should be open to interpretation. You Don’t Know Me was a cracking drama – and it certainly left us with questions and much that was open to interpretation.

Its climax, which we’ll talk around instead of specifically about, in case you’re yet to catch it, proved somewhat controversial. Social media – Twitter specifically – was full of praise for the series, of course. Rightly so, it’s been compelling, tightly written and perfectly acted throughout. Yet more than a few viewers were left feeling a little conflicted over its conclusion.

It all depends where you stand on uncertainty. Do you need your stories to be fully resolved and tied up in a neat little bow? Or are you more like ol’ Mr Kundera up there? Are you only too pleased to be served up something more open-ended?

This finale had just under an hour to resolve its tale, reveal Jamil’s real killer and – perhaps – let us know the fate of the unnamed central character, ‘Hero’. As you can no doubt tell, Monday night’s fourth and final instalment of You Don’t Know Me was happy to complete some of those tasks. But not that last one…

Once again, we left Hero on a knife edge at the end of episode 3. The fake trap house and the robbery having gone south with Jamil left shot – but not dead – in a bin, things looked dicey. In the conclusion here we followed Hero, Kyra, Curt and Bless as they struggled to come up with a solution. The only option appeared to be to kill Jamil in the hospital. But Hero is no murderer. That being the case, how did Jamil end up dead from a bullet? Well, you’ll find no spoilers here.

It will be an unsatisfactory ending for some. But the ambiguous nature of it is kind of the point. As Hero explains at the end: ‘Because no matter what those twelve people decide, there’s no end to what happened… In the end, if you want to know the truth of who I am, ask me if I love her. Because, hand on my heart, that’s the only question I know I can answer where it’s nothing but true. “Do you love her?”‘

Sure, this was a crime thriller, and a legal drama. More than that though, it was a love story. It asked us all, ‘how far would you go for the person you love most in the world?’

Would you risk life in prison for them? Hero did. Did he get life in prison? Well, that’s up to us all to decide…