The smartphone thriller that will have you hooked

A supernatural horror series from the producers of Sex Education promises to have viewers hooked. 

Red Rose, which premieres tonight on BBC Three and is already available to watch on iPlayer, follows a group of Bolton teenagers as they fall under the control of a mobile phone app with sinister powers. 

Critics have raved about the eight-part series, with the Guardian's Joel Golby promising: 'It will dredge up all your worst fears, as only great horror can... [and] make you terrified to use your own phone.'

The series starts with a spine-tingling scene in which a terrified teenager falls to her death after being hounded by a high-tech home security and entertainment system acting on its own accord. At one point a ghostly figure appears.

After the young woman is found dead, a shot of her phone screen shows she was using an app. 

The rest of the drama takes place six months in the future and centres around a group of six friends who have just finished their GCSEs.

Wren, Roch, Taz, Noah, Ashley, Antony and Pavlov are looking forward to a summer of drinking, parties and part-time jobs. 

Everything changes when Roch (Isis Hainsworth) downloads Red Rose after apparently receiving a link to the app from the school's queen bee. The distinctive red colouring looks similar to the pattern on the dead girl's phone. 

Roch, who has to help her hard-working father to care for her younger twin sisters, begins to receive messages from the app, asking her to reveal more about her life and setting her small tasks. 

She performs a spell in her bedroom and the lights in the house, which had switched off because there was no money in the metre, suddenly turn on. A dress she couldn't afford mysteriously appears outside her front door.

But there are also hints of something more sinister. The phone ignores a call from Wren, her best friend, and later rewrites a well-intentioned text into one full of malice.

Later, it shows her visions of her absent mother walking through the woods that chills her to her core. 

When she refuses to carry out one of the tasks set by the app - kissing her friend Noah at a party - a video of her collecting food at a food bank is mysteriously beamed onto the TV in the middle of the room.  

Slowly, her life begins to fall apart as she loses herself to the app.  

Friends fall out, secrets are exposed and Roch is forced into the app's twisted game. Soon her friends also fall into its web and it wreaks havoc in their lives. 

The show is also a warning about the damage social media can cause. 

'For young people, your phone is always there, it’s like an extension of your arm,' Hainsworth said in an interview. 'Everything is on your phone, and that includes social media which can have a really horrible side to it.

'Red Rose is a warning about the bad things that can go on there, and are going on.

'With phones, if there’s bullying it can follow you everywhere. You’re not safe if you go home. Even in your bedroom it can get you.'

Red Rose premieres tonight at 10pm on BBC Three and is available to watch on iPlayer