DVD Review: BBC's 'The Intruders' examines soul, rebirth, and conspiracy

The supernatural TV series, so long stuck in the familiar territory of ghosts, goblins, and vampires, took a strange and interesting turn last year with several fascinating dramas, including

The Leftovers

on HBO, ABC's

Resurrection

,

The Returned

on Sundance, and, last but not least, the chilling procedural

Intruders

on BBC America.

Each told the story of people who traversed the line between life and death - transgressing both categories. They challenged long-held theological views and our usual way of depicting ghosts as ethereal higher beings. The dead who came back to life in these shows were all very corporeal, very much made of flesh and blood.

Released on DVD and Blu-ray by BBC Home Entertainment, Intruders is an eight-episode adaptation of the novel by Michael Marshall Smith about a happily married couple approaching middle age. Their relationship falls apart when the wife (Mira Sorvino) declares she has switched personalities with a woman who died decades earlier.

John Simm plays her husband, a former LAPD cop with serious anger-management issues and a drinking problem. He won't believe his wife's fantastical story. She claims she belongs to a cabal of rich and powerful men and women who have mastered the secret to eternal life by learning how to track down and awaken departed souls. Trouble is, the soul they reactivate inhabits a body that's so far been controlled by an entirely different soul.

"This second soul kind of piggybacks on the soul that's been in charge," Smith said in a phone interview. "Now, that would feel like quite an intrusion."

Series creator Glen Morgan said the drama mixes very different elements from the hippie generation.

"This curiosity about reincarnation . . . really opened up in the '60s, as did curiosity about different kinds of religions," he said. "But people in the '70s were scared in the post-hippie era. They were exposed to killers [like Charles Manson], to Vietnam and Watergate."

Morgan said political and social discourse became rife with conspiracy theories, "this kind of paranoia that a small minority of people in the world controlled everything."

Intruders abounds with ironies. One character, a 9-year-old girl from Oregon (Millie Brown) undergoes a radical change when she becomes the unwilling host of Marcus, a vicious misanthropic killer who has spent every one of his many lives raping and murdering children.

It seems every character has a paradox at the center of his/her/its being. James Frain plays one of the cabal's enforcers. He doesn't blink twice when ordered to kill anyone who tries to steal the group's secrets. Yet he also is deeply soulful, loving, protective to those he loves.

Smith said contemporary audiences were wildly fascinated by both of the thematic strands in Intruders - its flirtation with religious ideas about the soul and rebirth, and its exploration of paranoid conspiracy theories. We're drawn to such stories, he said, because they express our own need to find meaning in the universe.

"We seek to explain this slight unsettledness we feel about our place in the world," he said. "We want a sense of wonder but also a theory to show that there's some powerful force directing everything."

Information: http://shop.bbc.com/.