Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic New York born, Panama raised, Los Angeles based, the director Janicza Bravo wasn’t sure about making a TV show in England. As she says, laughing, “I’m that kind of basic American who thinks that London is the UK.” The class stuff was mysterious, the accents indistinguishable. As she scouted locations, she was entranced by the sight of wind turbines and Manchester’s suburban housing developments, but also worried: “Are British people going to watch the show and think, ‘What the fuck is this?’ . . . I was really stressed that I was never going to get an authenticity.”As it turns out, Bravo’s unerring, uncanny outsider’s eye has produced one of the most singular and elegant series of the year. The Listeners is the story of Claire, played by Rebecca Hall, who starts to be bothered by a barely perceptible sound. At first it interferes with her sleep. But bit by bit the noise comes to dominate her perception, driving a wedge between her and the people she loves.Based on Canadian writer Jordan Tannahill’s screenplay of his own novel, itself drawn from real stories of “the hum”, a mysterious droning noise reported by people around the world, it turns into a lush, strange portrait of a woman searching for meaning and pushing at the constraints of the rational. “I see myself in characters who are destabilised, who are having home issues,” says Bravo. “Where is home? What is home? Do I have home?”Bravo comes at those sorts of questions slantwise. She has made two blackly comic feature films (Lemon and Zola), immaculately composed but filled with frantic action. In person, shaven-headed, well dressed, funny and frank, she has some of the same beady-eyed quality as her movies.“I traffic in stress and traffic in the awkward,” she says, as we sit in a London hotel bar overlooking the Thames. “I’m into bad vibes, things that are rotting.” Her first feature, Lemon (2017), was a curdled comedy about a man who goes into a spiral after his girlfriend leaves him. She wrote it in her thirties with her then husband Brett Gelman, who also stars. In real life, their friends were starting to buy houses and have kids. “We felt really behind,” she says. “And we were like, oh, we’re bad at it. We’re bad at life. So we said, let’s write down all the things we don’t want, and then we can exorcise them.”She’s drawn to “the rot” not out of perversity, she says, but as a way of understanding her experience. “My friend Brandon Taylor, who’s a novelist, said this poignant thing about the surrealism of being in a Black body — of being in a body that isn’t generally or immediately met with tenderness and generosity. I’m attracted to rot because it’s always circling. Whether or not I want it to be, it’s just there.”If Lemon was sour and tightly clenched, her next film, Zola (2020), was “young, wild and messy” — an audacious adaptation of a 148-tweet-long Twitter thread about two strippers on a Florida road trip gone wrong. After that, The Listeners felt “very adult, very mature . . . I needed to do something that felt really perpendicular.”As she was reading the scripts, Bravo thought of two indelible portraits of alienation: John Cassavetes’ 1974 A Woman Under the Influence, with Gena Rowlands’ agonising performance as a woman whose alcoholism estranges her from her family and friends, and Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995), in which Julianne Moore’s character is eaten away by a mysterious “environmental illness”. “When I met those characters as a young person, as my 20-year-old self, they were real strangers to me,” says Bravo, 43. “Now I’m closer to who those women are, and I really get them. They’re somehow no longer speaking the same language as everyone else, they’re not using the same vocabulary.”She thought, too, of her own mother. “I had this vision of her in her early forties,” she says. “I remember her temperature being a real problem in the house, it was never the right temperature. And she seemed to be sort of going mad.” As a child, Bravo thought she was the problem; now she reads it differently. “As I circle around those women, what I understood was this lack of fulfilment. And this fear that, once you’ve recognised it and named it, what if you never get to attain it?”Bravo grew up mostly in Panama. This was the 1980s, the era of Manuel Noriega’s dictatorship. She is an image-hoarder — in her twenties, when she was studying at theatre school and working as a stylist, she set herself a task of researching pictures for an hour every day, building up a digital archive of some 100,000 images. From her childhood she reaches for snapshots: monkeys sitting on the porch while she ate breakfast; military police roaming the streets, tearing into teenage protesters.TV was a refuge — “I felt less lonely with the drone of television in the background” — and she watched and rewatched Columbo and Fawlty Towers. “I’m an only child,” says Bravo. “I’m a fantasist and a fabulist. When I was a little girl, at one point I had 110 Barbies and two Ken dolls. So many orgies. And I’m Latin, so telenovelas are in my blood.” In her twenties she came to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Bob Fosse, Pedro Almodóvar. “It felt like they were theatricalising the everyday. I am not of the school of mumblecore. I want bigness, big old theatricality.”Bravo shot Zola on 16mm film and The Listeners on 35mm, which lends both a sort of temporal weirdness. “I think consciously, unconsciously, I’m imbuing the work with a kind of nostalgia,” she says. “It’s like I’m piecing together some sense of how it was, or how it was to those characters, which isn’t necessarily true. They feel a bit like memory.”She sees her work as a “time capsule . . . If I’m not going to make children, and Janet [Bravo’s 15-year-old schnauzer mix] will pass, all that will be left are these objects,” she says. “It is some archive of my own experience, ultimately. And my whole experience is a little bit foreign.”‘The Listeners’ is on BBC1 and iPlayer from November 19Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
