BBC Television’s new four-parter The Listeners is that rare thing – a drama that teases and tantalises, unwilling to offer the viewer easy answers.

The series is adapted by the Canadian author Jordan Tannahill from his novel of the same name, and made by Element Pictures, the Dublin indie behind Normal People and Conversations with Friends. It revolves round Claire, an English teacher whose contented life is disrupted when she starts hearing a persistent hum that no one around her seems to hear.

Making a welcome return to British TV, Rebecca Hall plays Claire, who is drawn away from her family and towards two neighbours, Jo and Omar. They also claim to hear the hum, proclaiming it a gift, heard by the “chosen few”. Is Claire on a voyage of discovery or is she falling into a cult consumed by conspiracy theories? It can be, as The Listeners suggests, a fine line between belief and mania.

Tannahill spoke to Television from New York, although he has lived in London since moving there in 2016, a week after the Brexit referendum, more of which later.

He found adapting his novel “edifying”, letting him “dig deeper and excavate more layers” of nuance from Claire’s psychological journey. Moving the setting from the US to the UK “was a fun challenge, one that forced me to consider the national differences to conspiracy, faith and mania”.

Tannahill’s parents were both fervently religious, which informs an enduring fascination with the nature of belief; specifically “why people believe what they believe”.

He continues: “At a time in which truth feels so subjective and we feel a general loss of control within our lives, there’s a natural instinct to search for answers – sometimes simple answers not offered by official channels. People, often reasonable, well-educated ones, are drawn to conspiratorial thinking, and the succour and community it provides them.” Some beliefs, adds Tannahill, “can drive a wedge through a family. I moved to the UK in the wake of Brexit, and the family of my partner at the time was truly a household divided by that one issue – it was heartbreaking to see. Looking at the ways various ideologies can both build community and also tear a family apart was something I was trying to explore.”

The Listeners is helmed by Janicza Bravo, one of Hollywood’s hottest directors, who enjoyed glowing reviews for her breakthrough film, Zola. Her involvement was one of two big draws for Hall. “Janicza is one of the most exciting film-makers working right now – if I find someone interesting, I want to be in their orbit,” she says.

The other was the premise of The Listeners. On one level, says Hall, it’s a “simple” story: “It’s about a woman who hears a noise that no one else can hear – and that’s it.” However, the hum becomes “a metaphor for how fragile all our experiences of reality are”.

“It was an absolute joy – one of the most creatively rewarding things I’ve done in a long time”

Neither family nor doctors take the hum seriously, and Claire becomes “prey to cultish thinking”, says Hall. “She is a character who is incredibly rational, whose belief system is rooted in experiential, empirical evidence, but she then falls down a rabbit hole.”

Hall, who rarely works in TV these days, welcomed the extra time a series offers: “The joy of working in long-format television is that all avenues can be explored. This is not a simplistic story of a woman going crazy. That ambivalence I find very appealing. You come out the other side with no absolutes about what happened.”

Hall enjoyed working in the UK again; this is her first TV show here since 2012’s multi-award-winning BBC adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. “The Listeners was an absolute joy – it was one of the most creatively rewarding things I’ve done in a long time. I loved being back. It’s still really exciting to come to a place like the BBC that is capable of taking risks and making stuff that is challenging and unusual,” she says.

 “‘Art house’ is a nonsense term, but there are things that feel less conventional than others, and I applaud the BBC for being open to that.”

Supporting Hall in a strong cast are Prasanna Puwanarajah as her husband, Paul, Amr Waked and Gayle Rankin as odd bod couple Omar and Jo, and two newcomers: Ollie West plays Kyle, a pupil of Claire who also claims to hear the hum, and Mia Tharia is Ashley, Claire and Paul’s daughter.

Executive Producer Chelsea Morgan Hoffmann and Element boss Ed Guiney knew West and his family. “His parents are theatre-makers, and Ed had seen Ollie in Hamnet by a company called Dead Centre, which toured and did really well,” recalls Hoffmann. Subsequently, West starred in Cork-set film The Sparrow.

Tharia made her TV debut in BBC children’s drama Phoenix Rise and then appeared in the Element feature September Says, which has won rave reviews at film festivals this year.

“Mia and Ollie are fantastic,” says Hall. “They’re genuinely young – I mean, they’ve just walked out of school on to the set. There’s a prom scene in the show, and I remember Mia saying: ‘I’ve just missed my prom.’ There is a real immediacy to young actors who have not fallen into the trap of relying on things over time, like us old, wizened creatures. That can keep me spontaneous and fresh.”

This was Bravo’s second job in the UK, and very different from the first; that was a documentary short a decade ago about Victoria Beckham for the magazine Glamour. Before starting work on The Listeners, which is shot around Manchester, London was all Bravo knew of the country. “I loved it so much,” she says. “I’m from New York, I live in LA  and I’m usually not good at smaller places – I can get a little uncomfortable.

“But I ended up in this village, and I felt very well taken care of. I really dug the people, they were warm and more open that I had expected. I found myself transfixed by the [landscape]… It’s stunning, so romantic.”

Unusually for TV, the sumptuous-looking drama is shot on film. “It looks sick, right?” says Bravo. “Shooting on film creates a kind of nostalgia… the show takes place today but feels like a time capsule.”

The director was the first creative on board, says Hoffmann. “I’d watched Zola and loved it. Janicza has such an incredible gift for capturing humour in dark places.

“It’s an unexpected pairing, which we think about often when we’re making films – [in this case] what would a Janicza Bravo show for BBC One look like?”

For Bravo, it was Tannahill’s script that “resonated”. She says: “Claire is the first character I’ve ever directed that felt really close to me – a woman in her 40s, having this reckoning… ‘Is my life fulfilled and, if it isn’t… am I going to take a [path] that I choose myself or am I going to continue on the path I’m on, where, decades later, I look back and feel that I didn’t fill this void.’”

Bravo is no didact, so The Listeners has an enigmatic feel. She says: “I didn’t want to judge Claire or anybody else. This is my approach to directing in general. The audience gets to cast judgement, but from a directing perspective, I have to be on the side of all the characters, whether or not they’re making good decisions.”

The Listeners is on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from 19 November.