TV REVIEW : ‘Mother Love’: Rigg Paints a Chilling Family Portrait

Diana Rigg’s psychopathic mom in “Mother Love” (on PBS’ “Mystery!” series tonight at 9 on Channels 28 and 15, and 8 on Channel 50) is a performance that will keep you shivering and running back to your set the next two weeks to catch the final installments.

The BBC production is immensely gripping, and Rigg will quickly make you forget her jumpsuited Emma Peel on that ‘60s British series “The Avengers.”

Rigg’s choking collars and slicked-back hair are telling images. But what makes the severe-looking Rigg particularly chilling are her eyes. They mirror fierce pain and fear behind a cold, marble-like glaze that is uncanny acting and hovers in your imagination like a bad dream.

Rigg’s repressed upper-middle-class British mother is a victim of psychopathic dotage. Her smothering love for her barrister son (James Wilby) and her obsessive hatred for her ex-husband (David McCallum) are terrifying because they’re so plausible, never melodramatic.

At the same time, Andrew Davies’ script (adapted from a novel by Domini Taylor, and directed by Simon Langton) is rich in family vignettes and the social texture of affluent London. In stark contrast to Rigg’s obsessive, vengeful life is the expansive world of her loathed but actually gentle ex-husband. Here, McCallum is a remarried symphony conductor and his wondrous family is redolent of love and music.

Psychologically, Rigg sees her son as an extension of herself. Forbidding the youth any contact with his father, Rigg’s possessiveness is suffocating. But it only produces a web of deceit on the son’s part, who secretly sees his father all the time. Friends, family, everybody, play out a game of reluctant lies with the mother.

Coolly crazed, she sees “treachery and dishonesty” all around her. Ironically, she’s right, as only the insane can be, and plots her revenge. It makes “Mommie Dearest” look like Pollyanna.

Combining a psychological thriller with Grand Guignol theater, “Mother Love,” with intercutting of scenes that flare like matches, builds to a pulsating ending in the final part. But tonight’s conclusion is a killer, too.

It’s too bad that these episodes (two hours tonight, one hour in succeeding weeks) aren’t being shown on consecutive nights, but this is a walloping send-off for the 11th season of the Mobil-funded “Mystery!”