Until I Kill You review – Anna Maxwell Martin delivers the best performance of her career | Television and radio

I have said it before, but I’ll say it again: What a lack of content there would be in the world, let alone the TV shows, if there was no violence by men against women. What an unrecognizable place it would be; how unthinkable for all of us.

Until I Kill You is a drama that, more than any of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of representations I’ve seen over the years gives some sense of the unfathomable damage that has been done and the strength that survivors require to to overcome their experiences – by which I mean find some peace, a way to live their irreparably changed lives thereafter.

Its four relentlessly confrontational parts are based on the book Living With a Serial Killer, an account by Delia Balmer of surviving repeated physical and sexual assaults – one of which nearly killed her – by her boyfriend John Sweeney. He confesses to the murder of an ex-lover while holding Delia hostage; when the police finally arrest him, he is convicted of two and suspected of at least three others.

Anna Maxwell Martin plays Delia, a fiercely independent free spirit, with none of the hippie softness that might suggest. She is an acquired taste – and few of her colleagues at the hospital where she works as an agency nurse have been inclined to acquire it. She is socially awkward, honest to the point of rudeness and uncompromising in her dealings with people.

These people include, until he becomes horribly violent, the man she meets in a pub and with whom, in her idiosyncratic and uncompromising way, she begins a relationship. From there we begin the tale of his savagery, the incompetence of the police and her mental and physical survival, which the long search for justice helps so little.

In many respects it follows what we might call the traditional trajectory of a domestic violence drama, but in Delia’s ferocity and strangeness we find someone not so much ignoring red flags as being furiously confused yet unbowed by the illogical in his behavior. (“You say you’re my girlfriend, but…”) This illuminates the abuser’s tactics from a slightly different angle.

Sweeney is played by Shaun Evans, in a marked change of pace from starring as a young Morse in the classy Endeavour. He matches what is probably a career-best performance from Maxwell Martin: human; charming at first, but increasingly monstrous thereafter; totally terrifying. Another free spirit, but one only bent on harm.

We occasionally leave the main narrative to follow the slow development of a missing persons case in Amsterdam. A woman named Melissa has gone missing. Despite her father’s continued push for the police, it’s not until a dismembered body is recovered from a canal that someone begins to collect dots and DNA and follow them to a conclusion.

Until I Kill You does a rare and admirable job of preserving Delia’s striking finesse. As her traumas mount, they make her harder, angrier, and harder on sympathetic officers and the few friends and family she has to reach. It’s a reaction as valid – and perhaps as common in reality – as any, but one that’s rarely depicted on screen, so afraid are people (producers, I suppose) of alienating their audience and so confident that viewers can be made to understand anything but the simplest explanations and answers.

Here is the author Nick Stevens (who as the creator of The Pembrokeshire Murders and In plain sightis becoming a specialist in the grimmest murders and killers), the director, Julia Ford, and especially Maxwell Martin are fearless. Watching it makes you feel, for once, like you’re being treated like an adult in possession of real, maybe even complex, intelligence.

Until I Kill You is an extraordinary portrait of the suffering of survivors. But there is no rush for sensationalism. The worst episodes are evoked, not dwelled on. As well as paying tribute to the depth of Balmer’s courage – and by extension, all those like her – it’s also a testament to the banality of evil. It insists on the essential pitiability—not pitiability—of these men and the needs they serve. It’s a magnificent treatment of a damned, never-ending subject.