Stuck in their own web of intrigue

As the name suggests, “Low Winter Sun” is as much a tone poem as a police drama, a mood piece set under the damp glowering skies of Edinburgh. The mood, as you might guess, is not good. The Scots are like the Irish minus the sentimentality -- they embrace the mournful violence of despair, the silent shattering of personal downfall.

And that is what you get with “Low Winter Sun,” pretty much from the beginning. Working with a palette of shadows, all grays and blues and blacks, director Adrian Shergold and writer Simon Donald introduce us to our two main characters: police detectives Joe Geddes (Brian McCardie) and Frank Agnew (Mark Strong). Joe bolsters Frank’s nerve in preparation for their drowning of Joe’s partner, the viciously corrupt Brendan McCann. As they speak in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, which looks eerily like a set from the “Saw” franchise, it is revealed that Brendan has killed Frank’s girlfriend Sinada, cutting off her hands and head so the corpse could not be identified. Drinking just enough to kill but not so much that he makes mistakes, Frank is grateful for the chance to take revenge. Which they do, drowning Brendan in a tub full of seawater and lobsters, then dumping him and his car in the ocean.

But what first seems like a whodunit in reverse -- a they-dunit-but-will-they-get-away-with-it -- becomes more complex with the arrival of an internal affairs agent in the department. Brendan’s evildoings have not gone unnoticed, and the investigation of his sins intertwines with the investigation of his murder.

Delving into the fetid rot found in some men’s souls, “Low Winter Sun” makes even the most cynical episode of “The Shield” look like “Cagney & Lacey.” The atmosphere is unremittingly oppressive. Neither the presence of the lovely Neve McIntosh and Michelle Duncan as the pretty and earnest Detective Constables Cullen and Bonetti, nor Burn Gorman, allowed to be at least slightly humorous as DC Morton, lifts, or distracts, from the palpable tension between effort and despair. Under a suffocating sky, secrets are vainly swallowed, many cigarettes send up their spirals of death and every other word is a curse, rendered lyric by the rich Scottish accents. A word about that -- as with the Irish and the Brits, to an American ear, the Scottish burr and cadence often lends a poetry, and significance, to even the simplest exchange. That is, when the words are intelligible. If English is not your first language, or even if it is, you might want to consider close-captioning, or TiVo it so you can hit the rewind.

Clinging to the hope that Sinada might be alive, Frank follows the tentacles of corruption that snake through the city, while Joe disintegrates before our very eyes, carrying the bloody hewed-off remains of his guilt around with him, at times literally.

From the opening scenes, it is clear that this story is not going to end well, and it doesn’t. But the performances make it haunting nonetheless, like the memory of someone whose love you unforgivably lost or the muffled silence of dawn after a long and terrible day.

mary.mcnamara@latimes.com

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‘Low Winter Sun’

Where: BBC America

When: 8 p.m. Sunday

Rating: Not rated