Ben Chanan’s The Capture begins with British soldier Shaun Emery (played by Callum Turner), recently acquitted of a war crime in Afghanistan. Just as he tries to rebuild his life, damning CCTV footage emerges showing him apparently abducting his barrister. Detective Inspector Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) is assigned to investigate and quickly discovers that the footage may not be what it seems. What follows is an eight-part spiral into conspiracy, deepfake manipulation, and the unnerving power of surveillance in modern Britain.
The series thrives on its post-truth atmosphere. In a world saturated with cameras, the show asks: can we trust what we see? The use of deepfake technology is chilling, not because it’s futuristic, but because it feels just around the corner. Everyday London streets become claustrophobic, every lamppost and corner camera a reminder of how easily reality can be rewritten.
Unlike many crime dramas, The Capture focuses less on interrogating a culprit, and instead interrogates the systems behind the evidence. The intelligence community’s “correction” program, which manipulates video to serve political ends, is presented with unnerving plausibility. The result is a thriller that feels both topical and timeless: a story about power, perception, and the fragility of truth.
What makes The Capture so unnerving is not its action, but its quiet plausibility. The show’s great strength lies in how ordinary it feels. London streets, police offices, and anonymous flats are filmed with a kind of clinical realism. There are no futuristic gadgets, no dystopian flourishes; just the everyday infrastructure of cameras and screens. That ordinariness is what makes the conspiracy so chilling. When Detective Inspector Rachel Carey begins to suspect that the footage has been manipulated, the horror lies in how seamlessly the technology, and the manipulation thereof, blends into the systems we already trust.
Performances anchor the paranoia. Callum Turner plays Emery with jittery intensity, a man who may be guilty, may be innocent, but is certainly trapped. Holliday Grainger is superb as Carey, her confidence eroded as she realises the ground beneath her is shifting. Around them, intelligence officials played by Lia Williams and Ron Perlman embody the cold pragmatism of institutions that bend reality for control. I think Lia Williams might actually give my favourite performance of the show, with her portrayal of the calculating DSU, Gemma Garland. That said, the character I can’t help but liking whenever he is on the screen is Cavan Clerkin’s DS Patrick Flynn. No one overplays it; the menace comes from restraint, from the sense that this is business as usual.
By the finale, The Capture has done something rare for a thriller: it leaves you less certain than when you began. The questions it raises. about evidence, trust, and the malleability of truth, linger long after the credits. The fate of Emery is important, but it’s not really what the story is about. Instead, it’s a story about how easily reality can be rewritten, and how powerless we might be to resist.
What lingers after The Capture is the recognition of how close this world feels to our own. Britain is saturated with CCTV; cameras are part of the landscape, so ordinary they fade into the background. The series weaponises that familiarity, reminding us that the very systems designed to protect us can be turned into instruments of manipulation. It’s less science fiction and more just a mirror tilted slightly forward.
The show also asks a deeper question: what happens when trust erodes? If images can be falsified, if evidence can be “corrected,” then the foundation of justice itself begins to crumble. For UK audiences, this hits differently than in American thrillers. Our anxieties aren’t about gun culture or militias. This is no Civil War. Instead, they’re about institutions and the quiet power of bureaucracy and surveillance. The fear isn’t sudden collapse, but gradual corrosion: a society where truth is negotiable, and authority decides what is real.
Watching The Capture feels like being reminded of a vulnerability we rarely acknowledge. We rely on cameras, recordings, and digital traces to anchor our sense of reality. But as the series shows, those anchors can be cut loose. There’s real danger that someone might manipulate the footage, but it’s far more dangerous to think that we might accept it. We might accept it because it looks convincing, because it fits the narrative we’re told. That’s the true horror at play here: our willingness to believe.
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