TV preview
By Damien Love

Towards the end of Secret Life, Matthew Macfadyen, a long way from Spooks, and giving the best performance of his career, shifts acting gears in an almost alchemical way that is fascinating to see but which leaves you wanting not to look.

Until this moment, his character, Charlie, has moved like a man always watching himself, and convinced others are always watching him. With his pale moon face, empty blue eyes and drab clothes buttoned against the world, Charlie has been as stiff and awkward as a puppet. Now, though, he has met a girl at a funfair and he relaxes, dropping his prickling defences to begin a wisecracking flirtation with her. Something has been released.

Flooded with energy, confidence and something that could be called charm, he becomes another guy, or another version of himself. It's a subtle but astonishing transformation, and it turns your stomach. Because Charlie is a convicted paedophile, recently released from jail having raped three girls between the ages of seven and 12. This girl he has met and whisked off on her own is also only 12 years old.

At this point in his film, writer-director Rowan Joffe - who previously scripted one of the most striking British movies of recent years, Last Resort - makes an equally remarkable switch between modes. For the most part of Secret Life, whether you like it or not (and whether he admits it; in interviews, he has denied seeking to elicit sympathy for his sex-offender protagonist), Joffe puts you alongside Charlie and on his side as he struggles both to rejoin a society that doesn't want him, and against his own compulsion. We know the nature of his past crimes, yet we almost overlook them to focus on the hostility that faces him.

Now, though, as Charlie moves in on his target, we are suddenly wrenched out of anyempathy,pushedbackoutsideto regard him from a distance, with revulsion.

Secret Life is a difficult watch, as it should be, not only because it forces you close to sharing the point of view of a child-molester but also because, having raised compassion, Joffe seems uncertain what to do with it. His main subject, however, is clear enough. The inspiration was the 2002 closure of the Wolvercote Clinic in Surrey, the UK's only treatment centre for sex offenders, which had a good record of success in preventing paedophiles from reoffending. Since the Wolvercote closed, plans for other rehabilitation centres have come to nothing because, as Joffe's script admits, nobody wants to live next door to one.

At the start of Secret Life, Charlie is released into a similar halfway house. But when it is shut down after a tabloid campaign and protests from angry locals, he is suddenly adrift. He is depicted as a man who loathes his crimes and it's hard not to side with someone when you see him being chased by vigilantes wielding baseball bats. But the real reason we feel for Charlie is that, in his world of loneliness and fear, the thing he fears most is what's inside him. He understands that he poses a danger, and wants never to offend again. But he needs help, and finds no support in place.

"Help for child abusers" is never going to be a slogan to win elections or sell newspapers, but the problem here, Joffe makes clear, isn't Charlie's - it's ours. If we don't believe in systems of rehabilitation, what are we to do with the sex-offenders being released onto the streets?

As a dramatist, Joffe is in the fortunate position of not having to provide answers. But it's a measure of the times, as clamour for a "Sarah's Law" providing public access to the sex-offenders' register grows again, that he has felt obliged to state that he is not seeking a sympathetic portrayal of a paedophile. That isn't what this programme is. It can be criticised for other reasons, most notably that the plight of the victims of child sex-abuse - most of whom suffer at the hands of someone they know, rather than strangers like Charlie - barely gets raised. Further, his film's ending, while effectively shocking and downbeat, is also somewhat predictable, and something of a cop-out.

Ultimately, Secret Life takes the easy way out. But were it to end any other way, it would stir up even more controversy than it undoubtedly will. It's an intelligent and compassionate piece and does a good, quiet job of raising a question no-one wants to consider, while reminding us that an answer does need to be found.