‘The Listeners’ Review: Rebecca Hall Excels in Starz’s Elusive Mystery

Late in the fifth episode of The Listeners, premiering this Friday on Starz over a year and a half after its November 2024 debut on BBC One (itself preceded by a Toronto Film Festival premiere), star Rebecca Hall has a close-up in which her character is halfway between laughing and crying.

My initial reaction was that she was intriguingly frozen in that middle ground, but I was so interested in the feat that I went back and rewatched what amounts to maybe a five-second shot. She wasn’t frozen at all. Every muscle in her face is working, some intending to maintain the smile and its illusion, some ready to surrender entirely to desolation.

It’s a remarkable moment and not the only one, as The Listeners amounts to a tour de force from Hall, whose status as one of our best actors (and, when she chooses to be, writer-directors) requires no confirmation. It’s a performance of quiet intensity in a show characterized by quiet intensity — perhaps too quiet. Hall’s performance will disappoint nobody, but the long delay between British and domestic release for The Listeners points to the likelihood that the limited series itself could frustrate.

The Listeners is one of those dramas aimed at viewers who like their mysteries elusive and their supporting characters to exist as a function of theme rather than storytelling.

Hall plays Claire, an English teacher living and working in the suburbs of what may or may not be Liverpool. Claire has a real estate developer husband (Prasanna Puwanarajah’s Paul), a seemingly clever high school-aged daughter (Mia Tharia’s Ashley) and a generally fulfilling life, such as we see.

We see very little, enough to know that Claire was raised in an ultra-religious family but abandoned her faith as a teen, that she hasn’t quite achieved what she hoped to, but that she’s happy enough.

Then, Claire starts hearing a hum, or rather: The Hum.

Nobody else can hear it.

It starts off as a low-level rumble she thinks may be coming from a fan somewhere in the house, or maybe even from the various wires and antennas nearby. It’s only a distraction, but it interrupts her sleep, which causes symptoms to escalate. Paul is understanding but concerned, especially when nobody can find a source and doctors can’t find a cause.

Soon, Claire is experiencing nosebleeds, increasing irritation and small breaks from reality.

Then, she discovers that a seemingly sullen and disconnected boy in her class (promising newcomer Ollie West’s Kyle) can hear The Hum as well.

Then, they collectively — much to the chagrin of anybody who thinks a teacher and her male student shouldn’t be spending a lot of secret time together outside of school — discover that there’s a whole support group of people who can hear The Hum, led by Omar (Amr Waked) and Jo (Gayle Rankin).

Claire has been viewing The Hum and her ability to hear it as a curse, what with the nosebleeds, increasing irritation and small breaks from reality. But Omar and Jo’s group is built around approaching it as a gift, or even a blessing, complete with the predictable big questions about what The Hum is, where it came from and why only some people can hear it.

Jordan Tannahill adapted The Listeners from his novel, which was built around a real and disturbing phenomenon of people in different parts of the globe hearing a low-frequency rumble they could not explain. In some instances, tangible causes were eventually discovered, most relating to industrial noise pollution. In others, experts blamed psychological or physiological issues. And sometimes a mystery is just a mystery.

Tannahill has characters acknowledge a variety of plausible factors, including the natural (“infrasonic communication” or “Schumann resonances”) and the conspiratorial (“5G”), but I don’t feel guilty telling readers interested in watching the show and hoping for satisfying answers that they should look elsewhere. This is not a “Let’s get to the bottom of things!” mystery.

The game, instead of “What is The Hum and what can be done to stop it?”, is closer to “What does The Hum represent? What does it MEAN?”

The answer is — non-spoiler alert! — “a whole lot of everything.” On the positive front, that means that no matter your source of alienation from day-to-day life — love, grief, addiction, depression, the modern condition — some of the resonances running through The Listeners will probably strike a chord. On the negative front, that means that The Listeners is thematically vague to the point that its openness as a text veers toward the blandly amorphous.

There’s a quiet profundity to the idea that all manner of conspiratorial thoughts foment in the hollow silence of virtual social spaces, that religious cults and incel forums and QAnon-style lunatic fringes all rest under the same umbrella. We’re all looking for somebody who will listen, somebody who can listen. But what if the people listening aren’t listening out of anything as benign as a sense of community, family or love?

That profundity, though, is undone slightly by how often Tannahill underlines his points in familiar ways, like Claire’s English class, which seems to be conveniently dedicating an entire semester to unpacking the line “Love is a disease” from One Hundred Years of Solitude, all while she’s a director or faculty advisor on a school production of Spring Awakening. The scripts simultaneously refuse to fill in the most literal blanks and aggressively steer viewers through the symbolic ones.

The Listeners ends up resembling Netflix’s recent Wayward, or a more impoverished The Leftovers or a less bonkers The OA. Without even saying which of those shows The Listeners is better or worse than — OK, fine…it’s worse than The Leftovers — that should set expectations appropriately.

At the same time, series director Janicza Bravo is approaching the material like a simmering ’70s thriller, from the bold red title font to the insinuating camera movements in which a slow zoom or methodical pan create an action-of-the-mind (because there’s very little actual action to be found). The film snob in me sought out connections to Polanski and Bertolucci, while enjoying the mood set by Devonté Hynes’ eerily ambient score and Steve Fanagan’s sound design.

Tannahill’s writing seems to be pushing viewers to draw conclusions — possibly all the conclusions — and Bravo’s direction offers a chilly and ambiguous counterpoint, a push and pull that I respected more than loved and one that will leave other viewers ranting about how much the endings of, like, Lost and Heroes pissed them off. I dug the very ending of the series, but several earlier stages of the conclusion left me wondering why the show was determined to be the most tantalizing but least directly provocative version of itself.

Even when I was less than actively engaged in the storytelling, I was fascinated by Hall and the way Bravo uses Hall for that “action-of-the-mind” sensibility. The series presents the mere act of “listening” as both a passive and active process, and that’s how Hall plays Claire. She’s a protagonist by virtue of her being inquisitive, but her pursuit of the truth involves a lot of standing around listening. Expressing interest and concern are two of the attributes that make Hall so perfectly suited for horror, a genre in which bouts of impatient waiting are punctuated by the terror or ecstasy of revelation. Even when The Listeners doesn’t deliver visceral elation, we can experience it through the openness of Hall’s emotional response.

The other memorable performance comes from Rankin, mirroring Hall’s observant turn with a quirky, never overplayed zeal. It’s notable, though, that the more we learn about Rankin’s Jo and Waked’s Omar, the less interesting they end up being. The rest of the support group is made up of “types,” and none of them matter or leave a mark, which may reflect Claire’s difficulties building attachments or it may reflect flimsy writing in a rushed series. The only character who becomes more likable as the series goes along is Tharia’s Ashley, who bucks prestige TV’s long-standing trend of sullen teens who get in the way to become a voice of welcome common sense. Not that there’s a lot of common sense here.

You just have to go with it, riding the wave of The Hum. The Listeners is finally a show in which big ideas and stupid plot contrivances intersect and often fail to resolve, a jumble of ambitions and flaws that Hall is frequently required to carry single-handedly. That she succeeds makes the series worth watching.