Agatha Christie Meets Elon Musk in a Twisty New Murder Show

The formula is as hoary and as reliable as an opposites-attract rom-com: Collect a disparate group of people in an isolated country house, and have them start turning up dead one by one. The phones are down, a ferocious storm makes the roads impassable, so the assembled guests must figure out for themselves who is picking them off. Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap has enjoyed the longest run of any play in history by using this premise—including a twist ending audience members were urged not to divulge—since 1952. Now the new FX limited series A Murder at the End of the World demonstrates just how versatile this classic British mystery trope can be. Knives Out, Rian Johnson’s 2019 vamp on the closed-circle whodunit, may have played up its camp value, but A Murder at the End of the World is quite serious in making it a vehicle for social commentary and a sincere depiction of grief. It’s a clever, luxe puzzle show, a highly polished tin man endowed with a beating heart by Emma Corrin’s performance as its main character.

Corrin plays Darby Hart, the 24-year-old author of a “true-crime memoir” describing how she and her ex-boyfriend, Bill (Harris Dickinson), amateur internet detectives, tracked down a serial killer. Lanky and androgynous, with a mop of pinkish-blond hair and a wardrobe of baggy hoodies, Corrin’s Darby resembles a fusion of the young Jodie Foster with Mr. Robot–era Rami Malek. She receives an invitation to a retreat in Iceland hosted by Andy Ronson (Clive Owen), the world’s most celebrated tech magnate. The invite is delivered by Ray, Ronson’s bespoke A.I., visible only through the VR goggles Ronson has delivered to her, and played with delicious serenity by celebrated audiobook narrator Edoardo Ballerini—aka “the Voice of God.” Abashed and a little thrilled to be ushered into the ranks of Aspen Institute–style thought leaders, Darby plans to stash her backpack in an overhead compartment during the flight, only to find herself in a private jet furnished like a posh living room. The hotel in Iceland is even fancier, a masterpiece of Scandinavian minimalism, presided over by the omnipresent Ray and nestled like a grounded spaceship in a vast, spectacular wilderness of snow.

Among the guests are a Brazilian astronaut, the first woman to walk on the moon (Alice Braga); a Chinese developer specializing in “smart cities” (Joan Chen); an Iranian activist (Pegah Ferydoni); a disabled robotics whiz (Ryan J. Haddad); and a Black filmmaker (Jermaine Fowler). But the person Darby most wants to meet is Ronson’s wife, Lee (Brit Marling, also a writer and director of the series), once a legendary hacker whose tricks Darby has herself used to solve crimes. The guest she’s most surprised to see, however, is Bill, who after their breakup became a famous artist specializing in critiques of technology.

A tentative reconciliation kindles between the couple, but then Darby, who keeps popping outdoors to smoke—one of the plausibility-stretching details of Murder at the End of the World is how much time people spend outdoors without gloves or hats—witnesses the film’s first murder victim, through a window, collapsing in evident distress. The death is deemed an overdose, and perhaps a deliberate one, but Darby will have none of that and commences her own investigation, hacking into the hotel’s comprehensive security system and questioning the other guests.

More guests die under dubious circumstances and the inevitable storm arrives, bringing not only a blizzard but also an avalanche to cut off the hotel and its occupants from the authorities. Darby chases plenty of red herrings and scrutinizes the requisite clues, but in a departure from the insouciant custom of country-house mysteries—in which the characters rarely waste much time mourning the victims—she also grieves profoundly for her lost romance with Bill. Tender flashbacks recall their even-younger days, road-tripping through a Midwest filmed through a haze of undersaturated yellow, as they track their homicidal quarry.

Corrin, who is nonbinary, has a face that transmits a novel’s worth of emotion with the tremble of an eyelid, and the director Zal Batmanglij takes full advantage of it. In one particularly affecting flashback, Darby and Bill meet for the first time in real life after weeks of communicating virtually. Darby meanders through a diner looking for him, her gaze lingering over canoodling couples and parents feeding their kids—all the creaturely pleasures she’s forsaken for life online—until she finally spots Bill waiting for a table in a shabby sweater. Their eyes meet, and Corrin conveys first attraction, then affection, then wonder—the whole story of a woman falling in love without a single word spoken. At times during Darby’s investigation, she will suddenly recall exactly what she’s lost, and Corrin makes these flashes of heartbreak as riveting as the series’ plot.

Whodunits need to keep switching the object of suspicion, which for Darby means allies who suddenly start to look like possible culprits and vice versa. But in addition to the formula’s obligatory enigmas, one of the central mysteries of A Murder at the End of the World is why Bill and Darby broke up. As a puzzled fan of her book remarks to Darby at a reading, “It seemed like you were so in love.” Just as the series’ apparent good guys turn out to be nefarious and the sketchy supporting characters are later revealed to be virtuous, the viewer’s picture of Darby, too, keeps changing. The other guests, all older, tend to underestimate her and to wonder why Ronson invited her. She’s our heroine, so we’re indignant on her behalf and disinclined to see her flaws, but they eventually make themselves known. Ronson, who regards himself as a sort of king (and rants like a mad one), tells Darby he invited her because he needed a “fresh page in a stale court,” but surely that can’t be his only motive?

Ronson has his own space program and a herd of construction robots, as well as a 5-year-old son he dotes on, named, inexplicably, Zoomer. The apparent model is Elon Musk, but Ronson is a smoother, cannier character. The series’ attitude toward technology is ambiguous, although eventually its skepticism becomes preachy. “They all think technology is going to save them,” the astronaut tells Darby, explaining why energy companies refuse to take the coming climate crisis as seriously as they should, and Bill compares cellphone addiction with cigarette smoking. Nevertheless, the series savors the gorgeous, effortless luxury of Ronson’s life under the tireless care of Ray. The pervasive surveillance this life enables allows Ronson to control everyone around him, but it also provides Darby with the clues she needs to solve the murders, making her uneasily complicit with his overreach. Similarly, she is both an agent of justice and a junkie who can’t set aside her phone to have an earnest conversation with the man she loves. Both Lee and Bill have Luddite tendencies, having spent time off the grid, but Darby never seems to have interrogated technology’s intrusions. She is a classic example of the error of letting the ends justify the means—didn’t she once use the internet to catch a killer?

Catching the present-day killer, however, requires more ingenuity. When A Murder at the End of the World revealed its final twist, I laughed for several minutes, but for reasons I can’t reveal without spoiling the ending or the joke. Who would expect a confection so delicious to be filled with such sharp shards of glass? Dame Agatha herself would surely be impressed.