Reunion review: This fizzingly angry sign language drama will grip you with its secrets and lies

And not just peeved, or cross, but fizzingly, explosively angry, eyes bulging and veins popping.

To be fair, it seems like Brennan, played with shaven-headed menace by Matthew Gurney, has quite a lot to be angry about.

He's served a sentence for the killing of family Ray Mokhtar, and as the first two episodes unfold, we learn that Brennan and Mokhtar have a history stretching back to their childhoods and time spent at a school for the deaf.

Brennan is deaf, you see, profoundly so, a fact which has complicated his time in prison, leaving him in his own particular solitary confinement, broken periodically by sessions with his case management officer – where he learns that his wife has died – and unpleasant altercations with his fellow prisoners.

Brennan's deafness is not the point of this series, however. It's a fact of life for him, his daughter Carly (Lara Peake), the victim Ray and Ray's daughter Miri (Rose Ayling-Ellis).

Many of the conversations are done in British Sign Language (BSL), which flows as naturally as speech, carrying all the frustration, spite, and love.

It means us hearing viewers have to pay attention, which is where Reunion could fall down if it didn't capture and keep your interest.

Fortunately, while it takes its time revealing its secrets, it has enough about it to keep you intrigued, as Brennan crashes about, upending lives which have settled back to some sort of normality with him behind bars, leaving behind him a trail of questions.

The main one being why he killed Ray – a man who, in the recollections of his family and friends, was some sort of modern-day saint, but who flashbacks reveal shares a deep dark secret with Brennan. A secret he doesn't want to come to light.

In fact, there are so many mentions of the fact that Brennan has never explained why he killed Ray that you feel there must be a big 'he didn't really do it after all' revelation at the end.

Meanwhile, Brennan experiences several reunions – with his daughter, old schoolfriends, Ray's family – some of which go better than others.

And all the while, adding to the general feeling that there is something deeper behind Brennan's past misdeeds, Eddie Marsan skulks about being suspicious and poking his nose in where it's not wanted.

In fact, Marsan is possibly the only jarring note as the new boyfriend of Ray's wife Christine (Anne-Marie Duff). He's apparently a veteran copper, just retired, but doesn't know of Christine's past and her links to Brennan, but is so adamant he should be recalled to prison that you can't help thinking he knows more than he lets on.

It's Peake as Brennan's daughter Carly who really stands out – a mix of fear, anger and love, all bubbling together and threatening to explode every time she meets her long-lost father.

And she has a nice line in sarcastic sign language too.

“Where are we going now?” she asks her dad.

“Looking for an old friend.”

“You still have those? Friends?”

Just on its own merits, Reunion is a slow-burner - part crime thriller, part family drama – which exerts a powerful grip.

Almost with you realising it, however, it also plunges you into the deaf world, making you understand it better, making you see all the seemingly petty, unthinking foul-ups which make deaf people's lives harder, increases the feeling of isolation.

From forgetting to book a BSL interpreter for an interview to having tall flower arrangements on table – makes it difficult to sign, you see – you can see why a lifetime of this would make anyone angry.

And thanks to Reunion and Daniel Brennan, you get to feel that fizzing, dizzying rage too.