Falling review: Paapa Essiedu and Keeley Hawes are on top form in this unconventional love story

Adultery is a common enough trope in television drama. But what about when the injured party is the Almighty?

While “a nun and a priest fall in love”, sounds like the set-up for a one-line gag, Falling is in fact very loosely inspired by a true story, and Jack Thorne fully exploits the dramatic potential over six hours. In contrast to so much television drama, it is content to lure the viewer in slowly rather than unduly impose itself, making the emotional peaks and troughs hit all the harder when they come.

David (Paapa Essiedu) is funny, approachable and has not long moved to Bristol – the sort of priest who believes in active intervention to make an immediate, tangible impact on people’s lives. This is addressed both indirectly, as he references campaigns to establish a needle exchange and install a basketball hoop, and head-on when his overtures to Tina (newcomer Holly Rhys) – a gentle teen with problems at home – about joining a convent are resisted violently by her domineering father (David Dawson).

Anna (Keeley Hawes), meanwhile, is a wry, calm and devoted nun of two decades. Having found family in the sisters around her (the relationship with her postulant has definite shades of a mother and daughter), she spends much of her time in the convent’s kitchen garden and is being lined up to succeed as abbess by the present incumbent (Niamh Cusack). Neither David nor Anna is looking for a way out, let alone looking for love.

And yet, after an initial encounter that would be characterised as mildly flirtatious in the outside world turns out to mean so much more, Anna risks everything to walk out on the convent and declare her love to David.

He cannot bring himself to reciprocate; to make the sacrifices she has already made to get this far, to surrender logic and protocol to instinct – to take a leap of faith. Anna ultimately is left humiliated and wounded. But is the barrier a purely religious one, or are there other hurdles they must first overcome if they really want to make this relationship work?

The first episode sets the tone for the rest: thoughtful, warm, witty, complex and chock-full of the sort of intimate one-to-one conversations in which Thorne specialises.

It means much rests on the actors, and both Hawes and Essiedu are on top form (last seen playing an assassin and an anti-establishment home secretary respectively – a decent indicator of range if ever there was one), keenly marrying stubbornness with vulnerability, accessibility with secrecy and solemnity with a twinkle of wit.

These are complex characters with deep, difficult hinterlands: in this opener, Anna tellingly mentions a lack of certainty ever since taking her vows, while David is lodging with his sister and her young family for reasons that become clear later on.

The generosity of spirit and openness of mind that runs through Thorne’s work – from Help to Adolescence – are present, but so are guilt and brutal reality.

It would be all too easy to position the Catholic church as a monolithic obstacle to the path of true love, or to mock its fustiness and ritual. While there are elements of that (notably in Jason Watkins’s conservatively minded bishop who makes his debut in episode two, the allocation to Anna of Hail Marys when she seeks counsel during confession and in David’s discreet repudiation of the “dither”), this is a respectful and non-judgemental portrait of faith that, initially at least, suggests that surrendering to your heart or your god are just as valid as each other.

Falling is a paean to community wherever you may find it and, perhaps more pertinently, when you might need it most. A message that feels more essential now than ever.

Falling premieres on Channel 4 on Tuesday 19 May at 9pm.

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