‘Half Man’ is punishingly bleak and hard to watch

If you look up Baby Reindeer on Netflix you’ll find it labelled a comedy, which sits oddly alongside the terror-filled, rolling panic of the show. Richard Gadd was a comedian and Baby Reindeer grew out of his Edinburgh show, but his follow-up, Half Man, is not remotely comic.

It is punishingly, relentlessly bleak — a long, slow, flat wound — and even a subplot about a suicidal cancer patient reads as one of the show’s less depressing threads. The brutality is relentless. Ruben — Gadd’s character, played by Stuart Campbell in flashback — is a mindless thug whose temper escalates as the episodes progress; beatings are frequent and graphic, to the point that a stomped face nearly becomes a visual motif.

None of the characters catch a fragment of light: they are either crushed by their lives or self-medicating with joyless hedonism. It feels like Requiem for a Dream, with worse haircuts.

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