Gone are the exquisite hand-knitted jumpers and choppy haircut from The Banshees Of Inisherin. This time Colin Farrell slides into a sharp suit and shades to play smooth private investigator John Sugar, cutting about Los Angeles in a little blue Corvette. Sugar gives a loving tip of its trilby hat to film noir’s movie heritage: we hear Philip Marlowe in Sugar’s whispery voiceover, meet various troubled femmes fatales (Amy Ryan, Sydney Chandler), and watch Sugar sipping scotch while suffering from a mysterious ailment.

The noir tropes are all there as Sugar hunts for a missing girl, but with an updated, post-Weinstein and #MeToo plot about one Hollywood celebrity family and its sinister secrets. James Cromwell (LA Confidential), Dennis Boutsikaris (Better Call Saul) and Nate Corddry (Perry Mason) are excellent as three generations of the same rich film dynasty; weary, shifty and slimy in turn. Sugar’s work takes him from Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing, where his client is a yakuza, to LA’s hills and dive bars as he doggedly tries to find missing actress Olivia Siegel. Of course, he isn’t meant to take the case, and his enigmatic boss Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) tries her best to stop him, but something from his puzzling past compels Sugar to get in deep. 

Our PI has a well-calibrated bullshit detector and an action-hero knack for outsmarting henchmen, so there are occasional punch-ups along the way and, for a certain contingent of Farrell fandom, shots of him stripping off and stoically dabbing his wounds. He has a few other super-skills that also raise questions about his background, which just adds to the intrigue. Jenny the donkey is nowhere to be seen as he navigates LA’s underworld, but an abandoned dog does become his new beloved sidekick.

Besides the storyline of murder and vice, writer Mark Protosevich has fun with his stylised homages to various film genres. When not sniffing out bad guys, Sugar is a Cahiers du Cinéma-reading cinephile, with choice clips of Cassavetes and Carpenter films regularly playing in his mind. There are also occasional Easter eggs for film fans, including a copy of the famous swirling-plughole-to-eyeball fade-out from Psycho. Robert Mitchum’s iconic tattoo-knuckled preacher in The Night Of The Hunter is another touchstone for a mostly wholesome Sugar’s detective work, where he strives to be a good guy but sometimes battles with the pull to his dark side. Featuring classy broads, massive ennui and some huge plot twists, Sugar is a gripping, glossy pastiche of movie styles, with solid acting to weigh down the moments that could otherwise spill over into suave parody.

Sugar starts on Apple TV+, Friday 5 April.