Regular readers (or anyone who read last week’s post) will know that I love a good mystery. I am one of the whodunnit’s biggest fans, I can’t get enough of them. I love serious mysteries, I love cozy mysteries, I even dig supernatural mysteries. I’m also a pretty big fan of Richard Osman, British game show host, Taskmaster contestant, frequent Would I Lie To You? panelist, and tall, funny man. And he’s also an author. So when I found out that Netflix was adapting the first book in his The Thursday Murder Club series, I was pretty excited.
The titular club is a group of retired senior citizens who get together every Thursday to theorize on cold cases. The group, at the beginning of the film, consists of Ron, played by Pierce Brosnan (Remington Steele, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again), a former trade union leader; Ibrahim, played by Ben Kingsley (Gandhi, Iron Man 2), a psychiatrist, and Elizabeth, who is quite tight-lipped about her past, played by Helen Mirren (The Queen, F9: The Fast Saga). It’s not a far walk to imagine that with this much talent, you’re in for top notch acting and they do not disappoint. They are all predictably excellent at the craft and they bring their considerable experience and poise to their roles with aplomb. Eventually initiated into the Thursday Murder Club is Joyce, played by Celia Imre (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Nanny McPhee), a former trauma nurse who they draft in for her medical expertise and keen eye for detail. Joyce is a new resident at Coopers Chase, the retirement village where they all live and she’s looking for something fulfilling to occupy her time, so she jumps at the opportunity to join the team.
The plot of the movie is very “save the rec center”, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because this sort of thing is still relevant today. The owner of Coopers Chase is Ian Ventham. He’s slick, he’s sleazy, he’s in the middle of a divorce precipitated by his infidelity, and he’s ably played by the very talented David Tennant (Fright Night, Staged). It’s really fun to see him play such a particular sleaze because all reports show that he’s actually a good guy; but he’s so good at playing someone you want to hate. Ventham is no different, as he plans to dig up Coopers Chase’s adjoining cemetery, build luxury flats, and evict the residents of Coopers Chase so he can use the grounds as part of the apartment community. Cue the fundraiser concert, the ski jump contest, or the Sweded movie push. Well, maybe not this time; the residents gather and try to figure out a way to stop him, and one man stands in his way: Tony Curran, his business partner. A rough and tumble kind of guy, he vows to do everything he can to protect the residents of Coopers Chase from Ventham’s plans. Unfortunately, he comes home to ransacked belongings, an assailant still in his house, and his own murder.
After all, you can’t be the Thursday Murder Club if a body doesn’t drop. Sorry, Tony, but if you don’t die, our protagonists are going to have to take up quilting. And no one wants to watch quilting for 1 hour and 58 minutes (most competitive quilting events only last 45 minutes to an hour, I’m told; if competitive quilting is a thing, this joke is really not going to land).
Along the way, they meet PC Donna de Freitas, played by Naomi Ackie (Mickey 17), a young former London police officer who has transferred to the countryside and is sent to Coopers Chase to give a talk on home safety after Tony’s death. They seem to hit it off quite well, with Elizabeth especially hoping that she can be a source on the force for them the way their friend Penny—the only woman on the police force in her day—who is sadly now in hospice care used to be. They all chat about their backgrounds, getting to know one another, but Elizabeth is quite cagey when asked about what she used to do. The woman likes to keep it a little mysterious, what can I say? But she is intent on getting PC de Freitas on her side and assigned to the Tony Curran murder. It’s a rather clever little ruse they hatch that’s very fun to watch. Kind of like a Faceman scam from The A-Team, but with more tea and blood pressure medication. So, much like Joyce, she’s drafted in to be a source, but she takes much more cajoling.
As more bodies drop and the TMC has to start examining their own neighbors for motive, the stakes ramp up. But Elizabeth always stays cool. She has this Jessica Fletcher bravado, putting herself into dangerous situations often, armed only with the confidence that she’ll somehow make it out unscathed. It can be frustrating to watch sometimes, because whatever her background may be, at the end of the day, she’s an 80 year old woman who can be easily overpowered by even just younger senior citizens, let alone actual young people with murderous intent. Although the film is about the club as a whole, Elizabeth is definitely the main character. I’ve not read the books, so I don’t know if it’s more balanced in written form, but perhaps that’s one of the flaws of turning a book into a movie instead of a series. It doesn’t always feel like we have as much time with the individual characters. But, luckily, Helen Mirren is one of the greatest actresses of all time and despite her seeming lack of self preservation, Elizabeth is a good character to follow. Though I definitely want to see more from Ben Kingsley’s Ibrahim; I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff to be uncovered inside that head of his.
The cast of characters is rounded out by Jonathan Pryce (Slow Horses, The Two Popes) as Elizabeth’s ailing husband, Henry Lloyd-Hughes (Killing Eve) as Bogdan, Ventham’s new contractor from Poland, and Tom Ellis (Lucifer), playing Ron’s former boxer son, whose career was cut short by injury. As the accusations swirl and the evidence mounts up, fingers get pointed in all sorts of directions. And while I can’t say it comes to the most satisfying conclusion, I also can’t say it was unearned; but the film doesn’t really encourage you to play along, rather it wants you to just enjoy the cleverness and ingenuity of their schemes and investigations. It is definitely fun to watch, but it doesn’t have the smart writing and direction to push it into the realm of all-timers like Knives Out and Glass Onion, nor does it have the charm and pith of See How They Run. But despite all this, it’s still a good time and if you like cozy murder mysteries like Father Brown or Death in Paradise, you’ll definitely like The Thursday Murder Club. And as a first film based on a debut novel in a series, it more than shows enough promise to be turned into a successful series of films. There’s potential here and talent to spare, so I am really hoping that Netflix sticks with it.
It’s drawn a lot of comparisons to Hulu’s brilliant Only Murders in the Building, but I don’t see it. Yes, on the surface level, there are similarities; a group of people living in the same place get together and solve crimes. But the impetus is completely different. Only Murders is about true crime enthusiasts, those many with that morbid fascination (the character Dove from Bodkin sums up my thoughts on the subject perfectly: “True crime podcasts aren't journalism. They're necrophilia.”), who become investigators when crime shows up at their door. Thursday Murder Club is about a group of like-minded investigation nuts who have always been interested in solving cold cases. It’s a meaningful distinction—the crew in Only Murders were passive participants in necrophiliac entertainment, our protagonists here seek out the unsolved in order to solve it. There’s more than enough room in your streaming schedule for both; it doesn’t at all feel like more of the same (not to mention that Only Murders is so deeply New York and Thursday Murder Club is so deeply English countryside that they might as well live in two different planes of existence).
Despite the relatively low stress nature of the movie and the inability to really play along with the mystery, there is a depth to it that I found quite compelling. There’s the undercurrent that runs through the film about the cost of forgetting people’s humanity. In western society, the elderly are discarded, forgotten about, and considered a burden. Human beings, who have spent their whole lives doing things, the way anyone else has. Considered an inconvenience. Maybe they raised a family, maybe they had jobs, and then at some point, we decide their useful life has come to an end, so like a fridge that gets carted off to the garage, we set them aside and ignore them. Migrant workers, like Bogdan, overlooked and dehumanized at best, demonized at worst, and often victimized and trafficked themselves, are treated so poorly and left to live on the fringes of society (and in fear, if they live in the US instead of the UK right now). And yet, here we are, with a group of retirees solving murders and running circles around the proper coppers and a migrant is working for a despicable man so he can send money back home for his sick mother. Even Ron’s son, the injured boxer, is insecure about his usefulness in the world after his career as an athlete ended. The movie doesn’t explicitly ask the question, but it left me wondering what exactly does it take for us to forget people’s humanity and see them as things? Why do we look at people through the lens of their utility instead of the lens of their humanity? I’m not sure that The Thursday Murder Club intended to get me thinking about this or contemplating mortality as I watched Elizabeth caring for her husband who is fighting a losing battle against dementia. Or thinking about legacy as the Thursday Murder Club passes the torch from Penny to both DC de Freitas, who continues her legacy as a young woman in a male-dominated police force and to Joyce, who becomes a full-fledged member of the club? But if that were the intent, well done. Because it worked. And if it weren’t, well, bravo anyway, because here I am.
Even though The Thursday Murder Club is a flawed film, it is a foundation for them to build on and give us deeper, more realized mysteries in the future. It’s worth a try.
