Gone review – the most engrossing drama we’ll see this year

David Morrissey stars in this tense, shrewd crime drama, as a strange headteacher whose wife has gone missing. It’s a hugely taut show which will totally subvert your preconceptions

What is Gone? Easier, perhaps, to list the things that Gone is not, if only to give ourselves something to cling to when the more familiar trappings begin to wobble, fault lines appear and everything starts sliding into a pit of churning unease.

So! Some things that Gone is not: a sitcom, a musical, a cooking show presented by sockless men with forearms like hams, a thing about whales, Richard Osman’s House of Games. Yes, George “Hijack” Kay’s six-part series is ostensibly a crime drama about the disappearance of the well-heeled wife of a private school headteacher. But this is merely the sales pitch to get it through the front door; behind the blandishments squirm a multitude of wrigglier, trickier things. Things such as the nature of guilt and co-dependence, the burden of professional expectation, preoccupied schoolboys, the banality of evil and unusually large dalmatians uncovering corpses in glades (“Casper …?! OH GOD”). It is an exceedingly rum do: a huge, confounding and shrewdly elusive thing. Every hideously tense second is weighted with the sense that something Profound and/or Awful is about to rear up from the bracken and thwack us in our preconceptions.

To Bristol, then, where a school rugby match is in full swing, the camera flitting between a forest of straining thighs as St Bartholomew’s stiff-backed headteacher Michael Polly (David Morrissey) watches expressionlessly from the sidelines. Michael’s team wins: huzzah! But what is this? The teacher appears curiously unmoved by the boys’ victory and is similarly unbothered when, later that afternoon, he discovers that his wife Sarah is missing from their chocolate box cottage.

Night falls. Still no Sarah. Daughter Alana (Emma Appleton) grows distraught. “Dad,” she says hesitantly. “I’m getting frightened. Did you, did you … argue?” Silence.

“We didn’t argue,” he finally replies, his back turned. A clock ticks. The chasm widens. “We never do.”

The police are eventually, reluctantly, informed.

“How are you coping?” asks watchful, dry-witted DS Annie Cassidy (Eve Myles). “You seem … very calm.”

“I have 160 pupils about to sit exams,” replies Michael. “Those predicted grades will determine which universities they go to. The fact that their headmaster’s wife has not been seen for 24 hours shouldn’t concern them.”

Annie narrows her eyes. “I mean,” she later muses to a colleague, “there’s a lot that’s not right there.”

There certainly is. But what? Guilt? Or a brand of self-control that has, surely, gone the way of the dinosaurs? Fastidious Michael, with his prewar haircut and neatly pressed waistcoat, is firmly, crisply unreadable. Not a blank, exactly (this is, after all, David Morrissey; few actors can do more with a fleeting nostril-twitch), but very much a closed book. Great pains have been taken to hammer shut his emotional vault; Michael has very possibly smothered it in garlic before sealing it in lead. He seems oblivious to the discomfort of those around him. Or is this merely another form of control? “He’s a headmaster,” observes Annie’s gloriously rumpled, seen-it-all friend Carol (the ever-wonderful Clare Higgins). “He’ll be used to getting it all his own way.”

“Hmm,” replies Annie, who has also seen (and, indeed, cohabited with) the type before. Talking of which, here comes charming ex Craig (Peter McDonald), whose efforts to win back Annie may not be as chipper as they appear.

Other things happen. Schoolboy Dylan (Billy Barratt) seems burdened by something. A cold case involving a missing teenager re-emerges from the past. There are lingering aerial shots of dense woodland: not the common sort, with its fly-tipped toilets, but the well-to-do sort; the sort where dog-walkers wave to one another and the corpses have the decency to wear Barbour.

Gone makes us work for our supper. Clues arrive at the table slowly and from unexpected angles. Stuff turns up and – twang – our preconceptions are once again catapulted into the nearest thicket (watch out, Casper!)

Suspense builds, continues to build, and then – the tension! – builds some more. How long before the elastic snaps back? “Not telling,” tee-hees Gone, waving more horrible things at us before scampering back into the undergrowth.

If there is a tauter, clammier or more engrossing drama this year I will eat my mortarboard with chips.

• Gone aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now. It is streaming in Australia on Stan