Is Emma Corrin's new murder mystery worth watching?
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Industry strikes notwithstanding, once you have started watching A Murder at the End of the World, the decision to delay its release from August to November suddenly makes a heap more sense. This is decidedly not a dog days of summer show, but an encroaching winter kind of watch – and a superb one at that (not to give the game away).
The new Disney+ seven-parter stars Emma Corrin as amateur sleuth turned true-crime writer Darby Hart, who we're told the LA Times has labelled "Gen Z's Sherlock Holmes". If that weren't enough, we know she's a Gen Z-er because at one point when a stewardess has to uncurl Darby's fingers from her iPhone, she replies deadpan: "This is like half my brain."
Darby feels made up of a dash of Nancy Drew, a lick of Zoe Kravitz's tech pro in Kimi mixed with a sprinkling of Lisbeth from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Fresh off a modicum of success with her debut novel, she is invited on a Glass Onion-style retreat to the chilly and remote plains of Iceland, where a ragtag gang of the best and brightest have gathered to solve all the world's problems in between stints in the natural hot springs.
The group doesn't quite reach a Rian Johnson-level set of characters, but Clive Owen's tech trillionaire Andy Ronson is malevolently ominous enough as the one spearheading proceedings. (Although, between this and Jon Hamm's Elon Musk dupe on The Morning Show, these monied megalomaniacs are getting a ridiculous charm glow up – is this what X is spending all its Twitter Blue money on?)
Darby meets most of the group on a private jet curiously styled like a Gothic mansion – complete with stuffed bookshelves which must be either fake or glued down since they're not seat-belted in place. Once they touch down in Iceland, where the show was filmed, they check into a bells-and-whistles hotel nestled in the chilly landscape.
Here, Darby comes face to face for the first time in years with Bill (Harris Dickinson – who, between this and the upcoming Iron Claw, may have an agent only capable of booking him jobs with questionable haircuts), who is her ex, former sleuthing sidekick and the subject of her book Silver Doe.
A Murder jumps back to that story of Darby's novel and their whirlwind romance in a dual timeline, which gifts Corrin some Courteney Cox Scream-era baby bangs as a visual cue to let us know where we are.
Back in the present day, the high-tech hotel soon becomes the scene of the crime when one of the guests is found dead. As Darby sets about solving the scandi noir murder, we also see how she and Bill unpacked the case of a rampant serial killer in years gone by, without the narrative every feeling like it's jerking us to and fro between the two timelines.
From The OA creators Brit Marling, who stars as hacker extraordinaire and Ronson's wife, and Zal Batmanglij, A Murder is a surprisingly grounded affair, in part because contending with our present reality is frightening enough. "200 million climate refugees projected by 2050," Ronson tells his guests when they first gather. "26 trillion in damages by storms, wildfires and droughts by 2070."
This is coupled with over-arching, somewhat recycled warnings about AI and tech, with furrowed-brow discussions about "alternative intelligence". These issues, about which the show doesn't have anything groundbreaking to say, seem somewhat misplaced when we ask whether Tony Stark-style titans of industry like Ronson are helping or hindering our demise.
Yet this doesn't upend what is essentially a tightly spun whodunnit. The hotel's futuristic mod cons even afford Darby her very own Watson incarnation, in the form of AI voice service Ray, with a syrupy Her-style voice from on high to deliver Alexa-style assists as she tries to piece the mystery together.
Corrin and Dickinson are compulsively watchable together as they track the serial killer leaving silver jewellery on the bodies of now-unidentifiable murdered women.
Meanwhile in the present-day scenes, the icebox setting leaves Darby in chilling isolation, as she battles the elements as well as questions over which of these strangers she can really trust.
Yet as much as she might seem scarily trapped in this far-off hotel with a killer in her midst, when Darby vows to solve the murder, we're never in any doubt that she's capable of doing so. And while we're in her assured hands, there are genuinely gasp-inducing moments along the way as we creep towards the final reveal.
So if you haven’t already opened a new tab to get up the Mickey Mouse streamer and start watching A Murder at the End of the World, take this as your cue to do so.
The first two episodes of A Murder at the End of the World are available to stream on Disney+.
You Might Also Like
