The Enfield Haunting, review: North London meets The Exorcist in eerie suburban drama

It is easy to imagine the borough being the site of some creepy happening

Haunted looks: Matthew Macfadyen and Timothy Spall star in ‘The Enfield Haunting’

No offence meant to the good people of this north London borough, but I can quite imagine Enfield’s far north-east corner being the site of some creepy happening, as was claimed during the late Seventies. Some places just have an air about them and Sky Living’s nicely atmospheric new three-parter, The Enfield Haunting, has done a fine job of capturing the suffocating eeriness of suburbia.

In 1977 Maurice Grosse (Timothy Spall, excellent as always) was summoned to an address in Brimsdown, Enfield, on behalf of the Society of Psychical Research (SPR). There he found the Hodgson family – single mum Peggy (Rosie Cavaliero) and her three children – who claimed they were being harassed by an unseen spirit. Having recently lost his own daughter (also called Janet), Grosse became a father figure and instantly sympathetic to their plight, until a second SPR investigator, Guy Lyon Playfair (Matthew Macfadyen) arrived. “High-spirited girls have been pulling this sort of prank for centuries,” he pointed out, and, moreover, the dashing, wordly Playfair had seen real demonic possessions in exotic rural Brazil. How could some smashed crockery and creaky furniture in a dingy Enfield council house measure up?

Horror often relies on the contrast between childhood’s innocence and diabolical influences (Regan’s contorted face in The Exorcist or the homicidal Damien in The Omen) for its effect, but few child actors rise to the challenge like Eleanor Worthington-Cox as Janet Hodgson. Could all this “poltergeist activity” just be the work of an unusually bright 11-year-old? Thanks to Worthington-Cox’s spirited performance, that explanation is almost more unsettling. From the point of view of stern Seventies Men like Gross and Playfair, the mystery of adolescent girlhood – with all its unaccountable screeching, malevolent whispering and menstrual blood – is horror enough.