There is a disorienting and slightly sickening sense of foreboding weaving its way through actor Peter Mullan's latest work.
The outcome of some quite excellent cinematography in The Fear is not dissimilar to the dank horror that seeped from the dark hills of Queenstown in Jane Campion's Top of the Lake, which also starred Mullan as head bad guy Matt Mitcham.
In the aptly named The Fear, which began last night on UKTV, Mullan plays Richie Beckett, a former crime boss who has moved just slightly to a new career as a property developer.
Richie Beckett is not unlike Matt Mitcham, Top of the Lake's cruel and incestuous Scottish drug dealer.
He is a little better dressed in The Fear, but, as episode one showed, disturbingly quick to resort to extreme violence.
Long-haired unicyclists who make the mistake of touching anyone's car are an attractive target for extreme violence, for sure, but the ferocity with which Beckett deals to the one he comes across is remarkable.
But ultraviolence is not his only problem.
Beckett, like Kelsey Grammer's brilliant Mayor Tom Kane in the excellent American political drama Boss, is losing his grip as dementia takes hold.
The Fear is set in Brighton, and director Michael Samuels paints the UK holiday destination as a dark town.
The show begins with Richie Beckett's apparent end - as the camera follows a bullet heading for his head.
The lighting is washed out, overcast and cold, and the town by night marked by groups of threatening skin-headed thugs.
But while Richie has gained some measure of respectability - he is seen shaking hands with the town's mayor at a press conference, unveiling plans to rebuild a burnt-out pier - his sons are more interested in following his earlier criminal path.
And one, at least, is not in the mastermind category.
Cal has got mixed up with some very bad Albanians.
Dad warns him off the Eastern European brutes, fobbing them off as ''cabbage pickers who throw rhubarb when they are angry''.
But these Albanians have very much more brutal methods, as Cal finds out.
The four-episode series follows Richie as he deals with two enemies, the Albanians on one hand, and his rapidly failing memory and erratic behaviour on the other.
If the show continues in the vein of episode one, it should be well worth following to its conclusion.
And it is further proof Mullan, whose previous outings include everything from Trainspotting to Harry Potter, is an actor of some skill.
The Fear even features a star turn by Richard E. Grant.
Brilliant.
- Charles Loughrey
