Forget cosy crime – Chris Chibnall’s leisurely adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials is an exercise in supine sleuthing. All the delicious wit and dazzle of the 1929 novel has been siphoned off, leaving behind a glorified game of Cluedo that squanders an impressive cast. It commits the unforgivable sin of being deathly dull.
Coming on the heels of the latest Knives Out movie and a starry take on Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club, the three-part series sees Netflix caught red-handed in an attempt to corner the bingeable mystery market. But while it gets the jazz age period details right – the frocks are fantastic, the moustaches magnificent – this tangled tale of mysterious murders in big country houses lacks a pulse.
Chibnall has assembled a stalwart ensemble, though not all of the players are on the same page. Helena Bonham Carter and Martin Freeman are the big names, but they seem to be under the impression they’re starring in completely different dramas.
Bonham Carter puts in an earnest performance as top hostess Lady Caterham, a character who harks back to her early career as an English rose in a sophisticated gown. Freeman, however, mines the part of Scotland Yard Superintendent Battle for dry wit. It’s as if he’s rewound to his James Watson from Sherlock, only this time he’s leaning into the comedy.
Martin Freeman as Superintendent Battle (Photo: Netflix)Better by far is Mia McKenna-Bruce as Lady Caterham’s daughter, Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent. A Bafta winner for 2023’s coming-of-age film How to Have Sex, she adapts effortlessly to the demands of a big-budget costume caper. Bundle turns detective after a potential love interest, Foreign Office worker Gerry Wade (Corey Mylchreest), dies in his bed in suspicious circumstances.
As Bundle digs in, the bodies pile up. But there is no urgency. Worse yet, several broad performances by the supporting cast make the mystery far too easy to tease out. The identity of the killer is supposed to be a shock, but I’d worked it out halfway through the second episode. Given that I’m the sort of person who loses their glasses while they’re wearing them, I suspect I won’t be the only one who figures it out ahead of time.
Still, Bruce almost carries the drama through sheer tenacity. It isn’t the first time Chibnall has had to rely on his female lead. He was likewise indebted to Jodie Whittaker during his terrible tenure on Doctor Who, where Whittaker’s commanding turn almost compensated for the ludicrous plots.
The real problem, however, is that everything simply plods along. Obviously, our attention spans are far too short nowadays. We should have enough patience to indulge a drama that proceeds at its own pace. But there is still such a thing as taking too long, and Seven Dials never get out of first gear.
Mia McKenna-Bruce as Lady Bundle Brent (Photo: Netflix)There is also an unconvincing attempt to weave in a quasi-supernatural mystery when Bundle becomes aware of a secret society whose hooded cloaks make them look like the Traitors when they’ve nipped out to meet Claudia Winkleman.
These masked menaces are also a feature of the Christie novel, but here Chibnall struggles to incorporate them into the central murder mystery. He also inserts a baffling flashback to Andalusia, where an enigmatic man (Game of Thrones’ Iain Glen) meets a sticky end in a bullring. This is eventually all explained – one more anticlimax in a show filled with them.
Any decent whodunit has to crack the whip at some point. Yet Seven Dials trundles down the track like a train chugging to a timetable. Across three tepid hours, Christie’s killer story is wasted on a series that feels dead on arrival. Presumably by accident, Chibnall has invented the entirely new genre of dozy crime.
‘Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials’ is streaming on Netflix
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