‘The Thursday Murder Club’ Review – Netflix’s All-Star Adaptation Works Well
Every now and again, a story – it could be a book, a TV show, a movie, whatever – is popular enough to redefine a genre, or at least popularise an offshoot of it. Such was the case for Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, a very smart novel that introduced a cosier version of crime, where the heroes were elderly men and women in a retirement community, everyone sat around drinking tea a lot, and it all felt very charming and low-stakes. It was wildly, astronomically popular. And thus, a movie adaptation was inevitable.
It’s probably about right that such an adaptation would end up on Netflix, a perfect venue for movies with an early-evening TV vibe because you can stick it on anywhere. You don’t need to find a babysitter and schedule a cinema date; on the contrary, the kids can watch it on the sofa with you, providing they’re old enough to be interested in redevelopment schemes and know loosely what a hedge fund is. Then again, several of the characters in the movie itself don’t seem to know what a hedge fund is, so perhaps it doesn’t matter.
Ah, the characters. The clear selling point of The Thursday Murder Club is its ensemble, which almost entirely comprises residents of an absurdly well-appointed retirement community called Coopers Chase. There’s Elizabeth (Helen Mirren, MobLand), a former MI6 chief who has moved to the facility to be close to her husband, Stephen (Jonathan Pryce, Slow Horses), who’s suffering from dementia; Ron (Pierce Brosnan, The King of Kings), a former trade unionist whose son, Jason (Tom Ellis, Tell Me Lies), is a semi-famous former boxer pursuing a TV career; Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar), a psychiatrist; and Joyce (Celia Imrie, The Diplomat), a new-in-town former nurse whose daughter, Joanna (Ingrid Oliver), manages that hedge fund I was talking about.
These folks all comprise the titular club, and gather weekly in the jigsaw room to discuss cold cases supplied to them by Elizabeth’s retired copper friend Penny (Susan Kirkby, barely glimpsed), who’s dying in another wing. But they suddenly find themselves with a much warmer murder to solve when Tony Curran (Geoff Bell, also MobLand), a business partner of their moustache-twirlingly evil landlord, Ian Ventham (David Tennant, Ahsoka), turns up dead. The local police, represented entirely by DCI Chris Hudson (Daniel Mays, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget) and WPC Donna de Freitas (Naomi Ackie), can’t crack the case without the help of the Thursday Murder Club, even if only one of them is prepared to admit it, and thus we have our movie.
And it’s a good movie! Directed by Chris Columbus of Harry Potter fame and adapted by Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote from Osman’s novel, it delivers all the expected beats with comfortable style and competency, aided by the stellar cast and the general cleverness and cosiness of the material. It’s undemanding, and some may even argue slightly bland in its broad strokes, but it’s also undeniably charming and well put-together and even, in its way, quite effectively emotional. It also has some things to say, especially about the condescension shown to our older generation, both in terms of their general capabilities and the importance of luxury flats over them having a comfortable place to die in.
In other words, it’s mainstream escapism in its purest, most accessible form. Sure, there’s a valid question to be raised about why any of these people are in a retirement community in the first place, given none of them seem to look, think, or act their ages, but the plot wouldn’t work if they kept falling over or having to shuffle to the bathroom. As things stand, it’s an effective and satisfying little murder-mystery with just the right amount of self-awareness that its premise remains sweet instead of becoming silly, try as it sometimes might. It won’t be as zeitgeisty as the books, certainly, but whether they’ll turn into a reliable streaming franchise is a mystery that doesn’t require a crack team of retirees to solve.
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