Sacrifice

Fans of Shetland might like this this windswept one-off. It’s a feature-length thriller about ritual murder set against the treeless beauty of the islands, adapted from Sharon Bolton’s novel.

Our heroine is Tora (Radha Mitchell), a New York doctor who after a miscarriage retreats with her husband (Rupert Graves) to Shetland. There she stumbles on buried remains marked with ancient runes.

“The druids, the Norsemen – they all perfromed ritual sacrifice,” a pathologist tells her, but Tora suspects this evil is more recent and starts raking over the case in ways the island’s patriarchy doesn’t much care for. It’s a serviceable story with sinister edges and the strong-but-vulnerable Mitchell draws us in.