Say Nothing; Secrets of the Spy Whale; The Real Fatal Attraction

“If the subject matter of Say Nothing were fiction, it would be a fantastically entertaining and emotive thriller. But it isn’t fiction. It’s a terrible story – many terrible stories – of a terrible time that is barely over. And it is a beautifully acted interrogation of the power of silence, the loyalty it proves and the burden it brings. However, it feels overly sympathetic to its main characters. Bar a few flashes of conscience from Dolours towards the end of her life, there is no reckoning with what they have done. And so, as the number of deaths and orphans created by their actions mounts, Say Nothing comes to feel as though it has left too much unsaid.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“A history, a tragedy, at times a caper as well as a brutal thriller, Disney’s Say Nothing is a sensational amalgam. The first task of any TV drama is to tell a good story, and in this Say Nothing excels.”
Benji Wilson, The Telegraph

“The beluga retrieving a mobile phone that a tourist had dropped in the sea and returning it to them like a sheepdog was amazing to watch. But, like so many animal stories, it turned out to be heartbreaking, a Lassie at sea, with a miserable postscript. What a singular tale, though. We don’t actually know if he was a spy whale for Russia — he could have been an underwater guard dog for Russian submarines. But you’d risk a tenner on a bet that he was sniffing out our undersea cables and escaped while on duty, wouldn’t you?”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“This documentary took more than an hour to get to the point, but gradually it emerged that Russia still uses belugas to guard its nuclear submarine port near Murmansk. The whales are trained to spot enemy divers. Incredibly, a satellite photo on Google Maps showed the facility, complete with a top secret sub and belugas.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“There is additional beluga whale footage, which is nice to look at but does push the film to a very stretched-feeling 90 minutes. It was undoubtedly done to give us time to appreciate the majesty of the beast and to ponder, as Hesten gestures to at the start, man’s warlike tendencies and our willingness to interfere with animals for our own ends. But it ends up feeling thin and unsatisfactory, especially when there is no new evidence about Hvaldimir or the Russian training programme.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“The Real Fatal Attraction was an alarming story, tackily told. So keen were the film-makers to milk the horror film allusions of the title that a man’s real and terrible ordeal was reduced to a modern penny dreadful, eked out to theatrical music.”
Carol Midgley, The Times