Welcome to The Thursday Murder Club! This will be your first time with the group, but the new Netflix movie — based on the novel by Richard Osman — has the makings of a snug little franchise, thanks to the ageless talents of Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley.
They play residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement community so ostentatiously turreted it might be where the Crawleys of Downton Abbey go to die. These seniors, their gray cells percolating with curiosity, gather weekly to consider the available forensic evidence of murder cases long gone cold — at the start of the film, they’re discussing a murder from back in 1973. But then a fresh corpse turns up, as well as a long-moldering skeleton, and the club members are off and running.
This is a cozy-comic mystery, very much in the British tradition of films like Murder at the Gallop, starring Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, and very, very easy to enjoy.
That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t optimize your viewing experience. Here are five ways to do so.
1. Do not try to solve the mystery
You’ll learn whodunit at the end of two hours, won’t you? (Of course you know you will — this isn’t one of those meaningfully murky mysteries like Anatomy of a Fall.) And you probably won’t remember who actually did it the following morning. It just doesn’t matter in this kind of diversion.
You do need a certain amount of mental alertness to keep track of the clues, of course, but not too much. You’re better approaching this with your mind at low ebb and the clock reminding you that bedtime will arrive not too long past the film’s 2-hour running time. Watch the film after you’ve done all the games offered by The New York Times, including Spelling Bee. Mirren, as Elizabeth, is already doing most of the work, anyway, running around cemeteries in the dark, pulling strings in high places (she’s former MI5) and reasoning her way past evidentiary obstacles.
Play along, if you insist, but remember you’re meant to be a passive member of the club — not much different from the slow-to-catch-on police, really, who show up from time to time but can be distracted with slices of tea cake heavily festooned with icing.
2. Approach Thursday Murder Club as if it were Helen Mirren’s own Murder, She Wrote
Mirren has been a hard-working actress for decades, turning in one brilliant performance after another — and that was long before she won the Oscar for The Queen and the Emmy for Elizabeth I. Check out her strong, edgy turns in movies like The Long Good Friday, Cal and The Comfort of Strangers, not to mention her Prime Suspect TV films (which are not cozy murder mysteries). In the past year alone she appeared in two series, 1923 and MobLand.
If she wants to kick back and frolic a little, have a jolly holiday, why not? Angela Lansbury cherished her years playing dear old Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote, but that didn’t mean she sacrificed any of her acting muscle.
All good actors, when you think about it, should be allowed at some point to star in either an old-fashioned murder mystery or a Mamma Mia! sequel. (Jamie Lee Curtis will be starring in a Murder, She Wrote movie.)
Giles Keyte/Netflix
3. Do not expect this to be another Knives Out
See the above note comparing this to Margaret Rutherford’s Miss Marple romps. Club isn’t like Netflix’s Daniel Craig detective franchise, which takes a more playfully inventive approach — at times studiously inventive approach — to the genre. (The next film premieres in December.) And compared with The Residence, on which Uzo Aduba spends an entire episode explaining the murder, Club wraps up a bit more casually than it needs to. Still, you can’t complain about those portions of cake.
4. Spot the British character actor
This is an enjoyable little game for anyone fond of PBS’s Masterpiece or the films of Mike Leigh. Murder Club is one of those productions that, like the Harry Potter films, gives employment to seemingly every distinguished British performer over the age of 40. (It’s directed, in fact, by Chris Columbus, who directed the first two films in that franchise.)
You may be inclined to read up on cast members as they pop in and out of the plot, sometimes with no more than a handful of smartly delivered lines: David Tennant (Broadchurch), the great Ruth Sheen (High Hopes), David Mays (Vera Drake), Celia Imrie (The Diplomat), Jonathan Pryce (The Crown) and, last but not least, Richard E. Grant (Death of a Unicorn), fussing with flowers and looking nasty as the devil.
5. Read Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
Club acknowledges but doesn’t overplay its central irony: These elderly crime-solvers will, in the not too distant future, learn firsthand the truth about the great mystery of death. Which is why Muriel Spark’s sly, brilliant 1951 novel makes essential supplemental reading: Its main characters, all elderly, are harassed by identical phone calls delivering the message: “Remember that you must die.” But don’t read it during the movie.
The Thursday Murder Club is on Netflix Aug. 28.
