Tangled Web:Chloe.

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive" - Sir Walter Scott

Becky Green (Erin Doherty) is a fantasist who cons her way into society events with great ease and when there drinks wine and eats canapes with no little insouciance before worming her way into people's lives via guile, deceit, or outright criminality. The persona she adopts for these events is a very different one to her real life. Often spent eating cereal, staring into space, with her headphones in.

She also appears to be a stalker and a manipulative liar yet you don't, totally, find yourself hating her - at least not all the time. In Chloe (BBC1/iPlayer, written and directed by Alice Seabright - with further direction from Amanda Boyle), we first meet Becky at home, in Bristol, lying in bed scrolling through Instagram and looking after, not particularly well, her mum (Lisa Palfrey) who has early onset dementia.

One Instagram page she appears specifically addicted to belongs to Chloe Faibourne (Poppy Gilbert) but when she logs on to her 'socials' one morning to discover, via the medium of Smiths lyrics, that Chloe has died, Becky makes it her mission to find out how - and in doing so slowly starts morphing her own life into that of Chloe's.

To degrees that can, at times, be quite head spinning. A man Becky slept with after meeting at a party, Josh (Brandon Micheal Hall), has his calls blocked immediately but, soon, it appears that the calls Becky thought had been coming from Josh had been coming from Chloe. What could it all mean?

To find out, Becky ingratiates her way into Chloe's social circle. Chloe's husband, the local councillor on the way up Elliot (Billy Howle), seems a mild mannered sort, consumed by grief of course, who owns a nice big house and seems to be forever slicing a pepper in preparation for a healthy meal.

Another friend of Chloe's, Richard (Jack Farthing), is quite the opposite. Richard is angry, with a passion for culture, and seems to have thrown himself, not for the first time, into the dangerous solace of drink and drugs. All he seems to share with Elliott, and another friend Anish (Akshay Khanna), are questions about Chloe's death and a deep sense of loss.

Becky's way in to the group comes via Chloe's best friend Livia (Pippa Bennett-Warner) and once, via duplicitous means of course, she's inveigled way into Livia's social circle, Becky's life becomes an upwardly mobile one of dinner parties, premieres, and high level spas where architects and artists mix with politicians and fixers.

Yet when Becky's mum digs out an old box of photographs, it appears that all is not quite as it seems. Soon we're flung into a world of hidden histories, shameful schemes, double dealings, and betrayals. Flashbacks, too, reveal this story is not quite what we think.

Becky continues to dig, further and further, into the secret lives of the group, especially Elliot and Richard but can we be sure that what she discovers is true or is it merely in her head, another of her fantastical creations? Equally, will her new friends find her out. At times, the walls appears to be closing in on her to an extent that feels almost claustrophobic to watch.

As ever with liars, the tangled web Becky weaves brings her endless stresses and problems to go with the opportunities and openings it creates. It takes her, and us, on a journey into themes of identity, inequality, loneliness, wealth disparity, class, bereavement, obsession, 'oblique energies', what social media does to our sense of self, and the rarely discussed intersection between politics and bestiality.

As an 'Insta' agnostic (though one who regularly doomscrolls Facebook news feeds) I wondered if I'd be able to relate to the story at first but Instagram was just a gateway into Chloe and it didn't take long before I was intrigued to find out just where all this was going. It seemed certain it wasn't going to be a very nice place but I had no idea where.

I had some misgivings about the, admittedly sensitively handled, scenes tackling dementia possibly sitting uneasily against the general overarching theme of a sometimes uneven story but the wonderful performances all round (including Phoebe Nicholls as a spectacularly catty Tiggy, Elliot's mum) and the brooding soundtrack (c/o Will Gregory with assistance from Alison Goldfrapp and Adrian Utley of Portishead, special props for including LCD Soundsystem's magisterial Dance Yrself Clean) led to a tense, compelling, drama where the possibilities for Becky getting out of all this without hurting herself and others seemed to narrow almost as regularly as her eyes did.

Imagine lusting to join a different world, a different 'set', and lying relentlessly to get yourself there only to find out that your new 'friends' are beset by many of the same anxieties and problems you thought you were escaping from. To find your new life just as imprisoning and stifling as the one you're trying to leave behind. And to find, most shockingly of all, that these highly intelligent and creative people still have their mobile ringtones on default settings.