ard to do sinister well, isn’t it? Scary’s easy: a child with blackened teeth flashes for a second in the reflection of a bathroom cabinet: done. Suspense is a simple trick, too: violins pulled to high tension in the background while five people exchange meaningful looks. But “sinister” is tough: the fine balance of Things Happening against a backdrop of high-intensity normal, so the Things Happening judder against the normality and the normality is rendered strange by the presence of Things Happening. The Third Day (Tuesday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic) is sinister, but before we get to that I have to explain what it is, because it will take a while and also I’m not entirely sure. On the surface, it is an HBO/Sky Atlantic miniseries split into three parts: Summer, Autumn, Winter. Those parts are distinct but interconnected. The first, Summer, sees Jude Law play that character he always does (“Man deliberately using his Englishness to barely disguise how dirty a shag he is”), exploring the curious island of Osea after being stranded there by the tide. Synopsis: everyone on Osea is either nice in that way that’s quite weird, or horrible in the way that’s actually deeply horrible. There is a lot of Imagery. Slowly, Jude Law realises something. Everything is secretly connected, something like that. There are a lot of slips of the tongue, and rabbit bodies found freshly dissected on the floor, and a woozy feeling of unreality, and children running faceless through the trees. Clocks are very important, for some reason. So that’s Summer. The third part, Winter, sees basically the same thing but with Naomie Harris finding things out, on her own arc of discovery and mystery and grief, and realisations that a particular stream “has power”. And then, in the middle, Autumn, our USP: a live theatrical event, held on Osea Island by Punchdrunk theatre company, a real-time episode broadcast live online and on TV. Like EastEnders did, once, remember, but arty. Autumn ties Summer to Winter. Florence Welch seems to be somehow vital to the plot. The form is as sinister as the story is. After Midsommar, we’re in a boom time for stories where a character suffering from a great personal agony stumbles across an idyllic religious enclave and slowly unravels when they realise they can’t get a phone signal, and The Third Day takes full advantage of that. In the wrong hands, this could feel derivative or obvious, but there’s an artful (and theatrical) touch over the entire thing. Jude Law is as good as he ever is, Emily Watson and Paddy Considine have never played a bad role in their lives and continue that run of form into this, and watching scratches that same itch that a particularly difficult Poirot does: all the clues are there, in front of you, you just need to engage the part of your brain that does crosswords to figure it out. Hold on, was your table always here? I swear it was over there a minute ago. Can I pour you some tea? Milk, two sugars, right? You know, you look like someone I know. Oh, no, can’t be. Long, time ago. Don’t look in the attic. There are photos up there that appear to have your face in them. Nothing to worry about! Here. Have a biscuit. Don’t look outside. It’s about to start raining.