Breathtaking review: Covid drama is deeply sad and often triggering

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey Get our The Life Cinematic email for free Get our The Life Cinematic email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Right on cue, ITV brings us the harrowing three-part drama Breathtaking, which painfully recalls the blunders, complacency and misfortunes inflicted on NHS staff in the earlier phases of the Covid pandemic. This is a deeply sad and often triggering drama, and also a highly authentic one, based on the moving Covid memoir by Dr Rachel Clarke, who worked on acute wards during the pandemic. Making a mark: protective masks and visors leave indentations on the skin of Joanne Froggatt as she portrays a consultant in ‘Breathtaking’ Most poignant is the plight of nurse assistant Divina Aquino, seen at first tending as normal to patients who she assumed had a temperature and a nasty cough, and then being intubated and placed in an induced coma herself. And that, as it happens, is the crux of the difference in political status between Breathtaking and Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which is that, unlike the Post Office Horizon scandal, the shortage of PPE, the crisis in the hospitals, and the amateurishness of the official response to Covid was perfectly apparent to us all from the very beginning of the pandemic.