At first glance, it might seem odd for a writer as ambitious and celebrated as Marlon James (who won the Man Booker Prize in 2015 for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings) to attempt something as seemingly generic as an episodic TV crime thriller. But, as anyone familiar with his sprawling, complex and multi-faceted fiction will know, James can locate worlds within worlds – so why would the story of a missing girl be any different to his other creations?
Millie Black’s life is underpinned by loss. First, the death of her father, then her banishment as a teenager from her native Jamaica by her cruel mother after she attempted to defend her LGBT+ brother Orville. Eventually, the adult Millie (Tamara Lawrance, superb) washes up in London, working as a detective for the Met – but there’s only so much bad food, damp weather and institutional racism she can take. When her mother dies, Millie takes it as a sign to return home.
Much of James’s writing centres around themes of transformation – and, as Millie joins the police in Jamaica and finds herself on the trail of a lost girl in Kingston (Janet Fenton, a straight-A student with secrets to hide), this theme asserts itself once again. Millie code-switches expertly between contexts. She alternates between yard-girl downtown patois and police jargon as necessary. But her homecoming is grounded in familial love, not professional ambition; she longs to reconnect with her brother.
But Orville has transformed, too. She is now Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen) – a trans woman living a precarious life in Kingston’s gullies, where LGBT+ people gather and brave the abuse and on occasion, the extreme violence – of local youths. Still, Hibiscus is distrustful of her sister and makes clear that she doesn’t need saving. “I not lost,” she says. “I did always know me. Better to be Hibiscus out here than Orville everywhere else.” When Mille absent-mindedly deadnames her sibling, it threatens a rupture. These transformations are, in some cases, of existential importance.
In a wider sense, Get Millie Black catches Jamaica in a state of flux, too, stuck between the trauma of a still-inescapable colonial past and tentative steps into the future. There is still a sense of hierarchy on the island, and of Mother England poking her nose in. The search for Janet soon widens to involve Millie’s old pals at the Met when it begins to look like the playboy son of a local white family (“a rich boy who likes ghetto girls”) is involved. When Inspector Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie) arrives from Scotland Yard, Millie is quizzical (“You come to colonise our case?”). But the story spirals outwards into something bigger.
James specialises in multiple perspectives. On the page, this gives his writing a kaleidoscopic quality; on screen, it adds a further layer of tension – a generator of uncertainty that augments a detective drama perfectly. Each of the five episodes is told from a different character’s point of view and even Holborn of the Yard gets one. It’s a striking storytelling gambit, casting unreliable memory and disparate identity as a subjective driver of motive. There’s a delicious psychological complexity at play throughout. In fact, the only minor false notes come in the occasionally expository dialogue around the detective elements – paradoxically, James is on surer ground dealing with the more impressionistic elements of his story.
In James’s hands, Jamaica itself is both a character and an abstract notion. In his novels, there’s an endless curiosity about the diaspora and the ways in which this tiny island has spread outwards and interacted with the outside world. It has been transformed by globalisation but also exerted a huge and arguably outsize influence on other cultures too. “Like every story about this country, this is a ghost story,” says Millie at the beginning, referring to the ghosts of both her own past and those of her country. And like any good ghost story, it’s sometimes hard to get your bearings here. Get Millie Black is a drama to lean into. It doesn’t make its essence immediately obvious. Like James’s novels, it’s both earthy and dreamily allusive; fragments of meaning and memory snagged in your peripheral vision.
So eventually, while this is a literal detective story, it’s also a figurative, emotional one – about identity, family, gender, self-image, and nationality. Even as the central mystery approaches some sort of resolution, the writing and performances, the perspectives and subjective points of view are compelling enough to leave these stories hanging alluringly. Get Millie Black lives and breathes. This might be a crime thriller, but it isn’t just a crime thriller. In the right hands, a crime thriller can contain multitudes.
