Delia Balmer is not one of TV drama’s “more conventional victims of violence”.
“Until I Kill You” is based on a true story, so it’s no spoiler to say she survived “choking, knifing, axe-attacking, raping and forced imprisonment” at the hands of serial killer John Sweeney in the 1990s, said Jasper Rees in The Telegraph. Balmer has “told her story” in documentaries and a book on which this four-part drama is based.
A “socially awkward loner”, she has a “weird globish mulch of an accent”, reflecting her peripatetic childhood. Anna Maxwell Martin (“Ludwig“, “Motherland”) captures her “orneriness, her cold sarcasm and bitter refusal to conform” with “committed relish”.
The ITV series is not just about Balmer’s survival after her relationship with “plausible, rugged charmer” Sweeney, played by Shaun Evans (“Endeavour”), who is now serving life for the murder of two former girlfriends. Balmer is also a “victim of the British criminal justice system, which spent years gaslighting and further traumatising her in various courts and police interview rooms”, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. “This is a harrowing drama”, but it is “also a compelling one, because of the constant jeopardy that Delia finds herself in”. She is not an “especially likeable person” and is “often rude and oddly obsessional about her few belongings”.
Writer Nick Stevens explores the theory of the “ideal victim”; that “someone, especially a woman, garners more sympathy if they are compliant, vulnerable, amiable”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. Stevens has said that he suspects Balmer’s anger may have contributed to the fact that it took the police six years to apprehend Sweeney. “The justice system doesn’t respond as well to the imperfect victim.” After she told police that Sweeney had tied her to a bed for four days, repeatedly raped her, and confessed to murdering his ex, he was granted bail. “The consequences of that decision are catastrophic.”
“True-crime dramas can often be prurient,” said Midgley, but this one doesn’t allow “the viewer to feast on Delia’s terror”.