Three years after the sometimes preposterous, frequently gory, entirely entertaining The Shadow Line, writer and director Hugo Blick is back with another satisfyingly noir-ish thriller: lighter on the operatic excess than its predecessor, but no less compelling – or less blood-spattered.

Yet whereas The Shadow Line was a London immorality tale about criminals and corrupt cops, this new eight-part drama is set – with unhappily apposite timing – against the backdrop of the ongoing tensions between Israel and Palestine and asks deeper questions of political and personal integrity. Honour is the new Blick.

The Dark Knight‘s Maggie Gyllenhaal stars as Nessa Stein, orphaned daughter of a Zionist arms supplier trying to turn the family business to more noble ends: bringing data rather than destruction across the West Bank. Outwardly a confident, philanthropic businesswoman, newly-appointed Life Peer Nessa (Baronessa?) is haunted by the past.

As a child, her father was brutally murdered in front of her; as an adult, she was kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza for eight years (not the only parallel with Homeland to surface in this series) and an event from this latter period is gnawing at her like Luis Suárez on an Italian sub.

But it’s not just Nessa plagued by secret gloom. There is palpable tension between her brother Ephra (Andrew Buchan) and his pregnant wife Rachel (Katharine Parkinson); Stein business associate Shlomo Zahary (Igal Naor) has swearword-riven fury simmering beneath his ebullient surrogate uncle façade; hangdog-featured Sir Hugh Hayden-Hoyle, played by the ever-excellent Stephen Rea, is closing in on an empty retirement of ready meals and regret. Black remorse pulsates at the core of The Honourable Woman like a diseased heart.

In accordance with a motif running through the opening episode – from the dropped queen in the foreshadowing/flashback opening titles (another similarity with Homeland) to Hayden-Hoyle’s meeting at a chess club to discuss the mysterious death of a Palestinian awarded the contract by Nessa Stein to run the internet cables to the West Bank – Blick patiently and methodically lays out the building blocks of this drama like a grandmaster positioning his pieces.

Things are set in motion with such care that each spike in the pace, each grim burst of violence, explodes out of the screen like a covert assault on the senses.

No shot is wasted; every second of screen time, each fluttering of flag, flickering of curtain and repeated airing of the disembodied voice recorded by young Kasim (Oliver Bodur) on his oversized digital watch has a deeper meaning. Some pay off within this first instalment while others are left dangling to be picked up later in the series.

The Honourable Woman is a marathon, not a sprint: a drama with more layers than Rachel Green’s traditional English trifle and Dante’s circles of Hell combined – and twice as darkly fascinating.

Airs at 9pm on Thursday 3 July 2014 on BBC Two.

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