This is a BBC made for TV mini series. It is a heart felt ghost story. Cam (Elliot Kerley) and his mom Eve (Suranne Jones) have a special relationship in that they share dreams and sometimes thoughts. Eleven months after Cam goes missing the family goes on a retreat to remote Crickley Hall, an old large home that was used as an orphanage for London orphans during WWII.The house if filled with the ghosts of children and the graveyard shows us many died in 1943. The film smartly moves between a plot and subplot that takes place in 1943. It is a slow burner, but keeps you engaged. It is not a scary ghost story. No real horror

I purposely hadn't watched this series, based on the mainly negative reviews I'd read, but a dark miserable wet day and it went on, if I wasn't miserable enough before, I certainly was about fifteen minutes into this. The story itself is dark and disturbing, but the way in which it was produced it was overly macabre and grim. An very good opening episode, a sound second, and a rather disappointing conclusion. It all fell apart a little at the end. The best thing that can be said about this drama is the acting, it is fantastically well acted, Suranne Jones, Tom Ellis, David Warner, Sarah Smart etc all really good, Douglas Henshall is great as the creepy Augustus Cribben, but it's the wonderful Olivia Cooke that gave the most endearing performance as Nancy Linnet, she was great.Worth a watch I guess, but if you've read it I fear you may be a little disappointed in it. 6/10

Someone once said of Frank Sinatra that he would do anything for money. I can only assume that this description applies to the group of mainly excellent actors who performed in this grubby little story.The rather tenuous connection between the loss of her own child apparently set off the sequence of events that took us back to the grisly happening in Crickley Hall many years ago. Flashbacks were on the whole handled clumsily, the supposed frightening occurrences were mostly ridiculous, rather than frightening (as I assume they were supposed to be) and it became increasingly difficult to understand who was who (in both the past and present). Although I now wish that I had followed my initial instinct and given up on it after the first episode, I stayed to the messy end and not for one moment did I feel scared/frightened (as I suppose the writers intended) - but disgusted that anyone should write such tripe (presumably for entertainment's sake). When it was over I was left with the thought that at least it kept people in work - but I would have very much liked to see their talents deployed elsewhere.

Now the series made many changes to the original book including minor ones such as the family dog was called Chester and not Clyde, but why change the ending so that Nancy fancies Augustus? She detests him and that never happened in the book. Also, Stefan was supposed to have been killed by Augustus, the BBC instead decided he should go on until October 2009. Now i know that in the book Augustus was supposed to have chopped of Stefan's private parts and caused him to bleed to death but the BBC could have just depicted Stefan being hit to death. Why change such a big detail? It made the story worse! The series was fantastic but I must say that the ending just made it undignified. Such a shame as I thoroughly enjoyed the story until then.