‘The Listeners’ Review: Rebecca Hall Sorts Hard Facts from Tempting Fiction in Eerie Starz Series

Directed entirely by "Zola's" Janicza Bravo and written by the author of the source material, Jordan Tannahill, the five-part series follows a woman whose life slowly unravels when she starts hearing a mysterious hum.

In between the first and second seasons of “The Last of Us,” showrunner Craig Mazin faced a lot of uncomfortable questions about the nature of love. That’s just what happens when you make a series about unresolved trauma manifesting as the ultimate example of overprotective parenting. But one of his answers stuck with me.

“Love is the problem,” Mazin said. “It’s the problem for all of us. And we don’t like to think of it that way, but it is. The odds are that we all will do something beautiful and sacrificial and admirable because of love. And also, all of us are going to do something terrible because of love, something destructive or violent or cruel. Because we’ve invented a word for a part of us we have no control over.”

Perhaps it’s just my own lingering trauma, but the idea of love as an uncontrollable danger lurking behind a veil of benevolence kept rattling around my brain throughout “The Listeners.” The eerie Starz series has nothing to do with zombies, though there may be an infection. It’s not set in the post-apocalypse, but you could easily argue the rash behaviors on display root it in an all-too-familiar pre-apocalypse timeline. It’s not even science-fiction, unless you believe a few crackpot theories tossed out by characters clearly coded as nut-jobs.

Still, the simple story — written by Jordan Tannahill, who adapted his own book, and directed by Janicza Bravo — illustrates various destructive choices and cruel actions ostensibly driven by love. “The Listeners” is not a love story, per se, but it is highly applicable to anyone who wants to love someone the right way, especially when circumstances beyond our control make the beautiful and sacrificial version of love that much harder to embrace.

First released in the United Kingdom back in 2024, “The Listeners” follows Claire Kutty (Rebecca Hall), a secondary school English teacher, wife, and mother, who can’t believe that’s who she turned out to be. “If you told me I was going to be a teacher and a mum, I would’ve said, ‘OK, but what else?,’” Claire tells some friends over dinner. “I was going to change the fucking world, man.”

Is she harboring a deeper dissatisfaction than her typically pleasant demeanor conveys? Does she foster delusions of grandeur that might make her susceptible to strangers who tell her she’s special? Might she want to blow her life up, at least on some level, as her ominous opening voiceover implies? “I couldn’t imagine how my life could unravel so completely,” Claire says. “Or maybe I could imagine it. Maybe that was the problem.”

The cause of her collapse sounds silly, but that’s also key to its figurative significance. One day, out of the blue, Claire’s idyllic life is interrupted by a persistent hum. She hears it all the time, but she can’t pinpoint its source. Is it coming from the new 5G towers installed in the neighborhood? Is it the long power lines draped over their street? Is it all in her head?

Claire insists the latter explanation can’t be true. When she plugs her ears, she says the noise goes away. But her family and friends aren’t convinced, and soon she’s visiting hearing specialists, professional psychologists, and medical doctors. (She even gets a spinal tap, in one of the show’s handful of sterile, nearly bloodless, yet deeply squeamish scenes.) Anyone who might have an answer for Claire is on the table, but she’s steadfast in her belief that the noise only exists in her mind.

Her conviction doubles when Kyle (Ollie West), one of her teenage students, tells Claire he can hear the hum, too. Soon, they’re going on long drives to investigate various power stations and antenna farms, hoping to find the cause of their constant irritation. Claire knows a teacher palling around with a 16-year-old kid is a bad look, so she doesn’t tell anyone who she’s spending time with or why — a decision as understandable from the inside as it is idiotic from the outside.

But before she can rethink her plan — you try to think straight with a constant humming playing in your head — Kyle discovers a group of fellow “listeners.” Led by Omar (Amr Waked) and Jo (Gayle Rankin), the support group meets to advance theories about the sound’s origin and reassure one another that they’re not crazy. Neither goal really works — no one can agree on a theory long enough to prove it right or wrong, and a few conspiracy-minded members make it difficult for everyone else to believe being there proves their sanity — but they do listen. They actively listen to each other, and they actively listen to the hum.

To say much more about the group, let alone what happens to Claire, would betray the story’s enigmatic nature. “The Listeners,” mostly to its credit, is widely interpretable. You could watch it as another anxiety-driven thriller, where Claire’s questionable choices lead her into danger she could’ve avoided with a little more discipline and common sense. You could watch it as a realistic portrayal of susceptibility, where a very smart, very driven woman is nonetheless sucked into a cult and its isolating worldview. Or you could watch it with a more empathetic, anthropologic eye, where our hero is presented with an inexplicable phenomenon and does her best to sort it out, because what other choice does she have?

None of these readings are so emphatic as to render the others immaterial, and the pervading ambivalence paired with a steady but creeping pace could turn off viewers who just want a good mystery to solve. But for me, “The Listeners” works best when you interrogate the people who try to force their perspectives onto Claire’s search for the truth. Her husband, Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah), is too unconcerned with Claire’s claims and too worried about what people might think of her. Her daughter, Ashley (Mia Tharia), is similarly eager to get back to normal, even at the expense of her mother’s well-being. Omar and Jo want to enforce rules around a situation no one can explain, and even Kyle puts his own needs ahead of his teachers, despite earnest claims that he loves her (albeit not in a romantic way).

All of these people insist they care about Claire, and “The Listeners” actually makes it easy to believe that they do. But just because you love someone doesn’t mean you know what’s best for them, just like listening to someone isn’t the same as hearing them. Both can be selfish, and both can be hard to see clearly on your own. Claire longs to be heard almost as much as she longs to stop hearing that damn hum, and both longings lead her down paths that only seem scalable if you’re walking alongside her.

That doesn’t mean taking them is right. Fiction can be tempting when facts prove elusive, and Tannahill’s series cherishes dancing between the demanding allure of the unknown and the fearful certainty of what can happen when pursuing it. Hall knows the steps inside and out, crafting a layered, knowing character who never feels as abstract as the world around her, and Bravo breaks up many steady, static frames with dreamy, hypnotic imagery to better illustrate Claire’s slackening tether to reality.

Sometimes following your heart leads to something terrible. But sometimes it’s the only way forward that makes any sense. Maybe the best we can hope for is to be surrounded by people who will listen to the beat, even when it gets too loud to bear.

Grade: B

“The Listeners” premieres Friday, June 12 on Starz. New episodes will be released every Friday through the finale on July 10.