Two Weeks to Live review – Maisie Williams is out for revenge

Two Weeks to Live (Sky One) stamps the words NORTH OF ENGLAND across the screen, in big, bold, sans serif capital letters. It drops us straight into the action in a roadside cafe that has a touch of the Edward Hoppers, then launches into a loud cover of Stayin’ Alive by the band Tropical Fuck Storm. Blink and you could be watching The End of the F**king World. Then Maisie Williams arrives, a seemingly naive young woman with a 1,000-yard stare and the surprising ability to pummel the life out of a burly bloke. Now you could be watching Killing Eve. Two Weeks to Live borrows liberally from the aesthetic of both, which means it’s about as 2020 as an argument about face masks in the baking aisle. Yet, despite such insta-familiarity, it manages to find a charm all of its own.

Williams updates her kill list from Game of Thrones to play Kim, who has been brought up in doomsday-prepper isolation in Scotland by her mother, Tina (Fleabag’s Sian Clifford, sporting an appropriately sensible outdoorsy haircut here). It’s a self-contained life; while most parents summon their children to eat with a simple “Dinnertime!”, Tina prefers: “It’s your turn to disembowel dinner, when you’ve got a sec.”

But this time, Kim isn’t there to help with the gutting. She is keen to see the real world for herself; to experience life as others live it. She would, she scribbles in the notebook entitled Things to Do in the Real World, do things such as to “watch She Is All That [sic]”. So she flees for the south coast, with a tatty photograph of her parents, on a mission of revenge. If she gets around to it, Kim would like to kill the man who killed her father in front of her when she was six years old.

If that sounds like a lot of plot, well, there’s more. One of the items on Kim’s hitlist, the one that is fun rather than murderous, is going to the pub for the first time. There, she meets two bickering brothers: Nicky, who is studious, quiet and heartbroken, and Jay, a bona fide banter merchant who loves nothing more than teasing his bookish, sensitive sibling. When Jay fakes a news report warning of imminent nuclear apocalypse in two weeks, Kim believes it, setting a whole world of terrible events in motion. After all, Kim has been preparing for the apocalypse since she was six. “The government is hiding how bad it really is,” she whispers, which might have sounded like the ramblings of a paranoid truther, but then, well, welcome to 2020.

Jay’s bad prank has consequences, prompting Kim to get on with her plans, and this kicks another layer of plot into action. The episodes require a bit of leaning back and letting it all simply exist, without looking too carefully into the details, but I admired its dedication to a zippy pace. All six episodes are online, and each one contains a film’s worth of action. Early on in the first, Kim walks into Carl’s Caff – half-alien, half-child – and the proprietor spies an easy target. Money is new to Kim; she refers to the notes as “the orange ones”, and Carl demands £10 for use of the bathroom, £10 to heat up her sandwich, £10 for parking (what is this, London?). Naturally, Carl ends up in a pile on the floor, surrounded by broken glass. What makes Two Weeks to Live so enjoyable is that it then takes a diversion into comedy, and not clever-clever dark comedy, but proper slapstick.

This unexpected swerve lifts it above what might be expected for a show that contains elements that are aesthetically very familiar, at least to anyone who has gobbled up a graphic-novel-esque comedy-drama containing lots of fighting and a decent soundtrack. The gags are cleverly layered: if there’s ever a cheesy line, it tumbles into a smarter joke, then erupts into some shocking act of violence. While Jay and Nicky trade barbs as if they’re at an Inbetweeners convention, there’s also a decent amount of heart to their relationship, and a thread of grief and loss running through Two Weeks to Live that gives it extra depth. Mostly, though, it survives on the strength of its performances. In other hands, Kim’s naivety might be irritating, but Williams makes it sing, backed up by a merry band of idiots, a sense of urgency – and that well-honed thirst for vengeance.