The Ice House

Grim, engrossing U.K. TV mystery from the best-selling crime novel. No doubt in an effort to soak up some of that ancillary James Bond promotional gravy, BBC and Warner Home Video have released The Ice House, the 1997 television adaptation of Minette Walters' award-winning novel, starring Daniel Craig, Corin Redgrave, Kitty Aldridge, Frances Barber, and Penny Downie. A forbidding, depressing mystery that touches on uncomfortable themes such as pedophilia, homophobia, lawless retribution, and incest, The Ice House is recommended viewing for those U.K. mystery fans who like their "cozy village mysteries" not so cozy. A lengthy featurette on the author is included as a welcome bonus for this good-looking transfer.

Street Grange, Silverbourne. Frightened handyman Fred Phillips (Dave Hill) comes running up to the Grange's owner, Phoebe Maybury (Penny Downie), who's enjoying the morning on her patio with housemates Anne Cattrell (Kitty Aldridge) and Diana Goode (Frances Barber). Fred, badly shaken, has found a badly decomposed, partially consumed nude body in the abandoned ice house, located inside an overgrown hillock on the grounds. The police are called, with coarse, single-minded Detective Chief Inspector George Walsh (Corin Redgrave, excellent as always in an unsympathetic, to say the least, role) taking along his Detective Sergeant Andy McLoughlin (Daniel Craig), to interview the "butch beauties" of Street Grange. D.C.I. Walsh is almost positive the body in the ice house is Maybury's long-lost husband David (Paul Jerricho), who went missing ten years, and whom many people in the local village believe was murdered by Phoebe. The locals, hostile towards Maybury because they believe she also killed her parents for her inheritance, are equally unaccepting of her lifestyle: they disparage her and her housemates as predatory lesbians. That's certainly the story that D.S. McLoughlin, newly separated from his wife and tilting dangerously towards alcoholism, has hea...