Helen Archer | On 19, Nov 2024




Delia Balmer was 40 years old when she met John Sweeney in a London pub in 1991. A self-described “free spirit” who enjoyed travelling, the Canadian-born, American-raised nurse found herself working in a hospital in England’s capital, many miles from her family in Texas. The few friends she had she knew from work, though her spiky nature meant she was something of an outcast. Her social and familial isolation made her unwittingly vulnerable – perfect prey for a predator like Sweeney.

Based on her autobiography, Living with a Serial Killer, Until I Kill You details some of Balmer’s three-year relationship with itinerant construction worker Sweeney – a man more abusive than anyone could possibly have imagined – but it details, too, the years-long recovery process after his final attack on her. And it is no less forgiving of the police and criminal justice system, whose mistakes and non-mistakes – acting as it’s meant to – only served to exacerbate the trauma meted out to her.

Written by Nick Stevens (The Pembrokeshire Murders; In Plain Sight) and directed by Julia Ford, the four-part series stars Anna Maxwell Martin as Balmer and Shaun Evans as Sweeney. While the first two episodes centre on their relationship, the second two can be seen more as a character study, as Delia escapes the physical grip of Sweeney, only to find herself changed irrevocably. This second half is where the drama veers from the terror of being trapped in an abusive relationship, towards something less interrogated in dramatic depictions of abuse, becoming an intimate portrayal of a survivor who is nonetheless still held hostage to attacks of the past.

The psychological damage Balmer suffered is presented as one and the same as the permanent physical scars inflicted on her, affecting all her relationships. Though she accepts some small kindnesses – from the staff at the women’s refuge where she is housed temporarily, from her one good friend who she feels she has endangered, and, significantly, from the man she forms her next relationship with – she grasps people close, but simultaneously pushes them away. Despite their best efforts, most are ill-equipped to deal with Delia’s needs, and each relationship is marred by her experiences.

But it is the police and lawyers who bear the brunt of her anger – for understandable reasons. Their ineptitude place her in danger again and again – not just from Sweeney, but from herself. From the system which allows Sweeney out on bail but doesn’t allow her to leave the country, to the lawyer who “puts it to her” that the abuse was assented, as part of a mutually consensual sado-masochistic relationship, to the police who threw her in prison for the night when she was on her way home from a dinner date – her mistrust of authority and her rebellion against it is presented as the only reasonable position to take.

Anna Maxwell Martin is outstanding as Delia, in a performance so raw as to be painful to watch. Which is perhaps the point, as this thoughtful, challenging series documents so meticulously the enduring torment and fear which comes with experiences such as Delia’s, and the inability to escape mentally, even long after escaping physically. 

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