The Thursday Murder Club, produced by Jennifer Todd and Chris Columbus, on Netflix is sprightly take on Richard Osman’s beloved novel. It’s part stately home mystery, part cardigan-cloaked rebellion, and wholly convinced that murder is best solved with tea, sarcasm, and a clipboard.
Forget the moody detectives in long coats. Here, the case is cracked in the jigsaw room. By pensioners. With receipts.
Helen Mirren strides in as Elizabeth — ex-intelligence, always ten steps ahead, her hair more precise than any crime scene diagram. Pierce Brosnan grumbles charmingly as Ron, a retired union bruiser with a heart beating somewhere beneath the boiler suit. Ben Kingsley’s Ibrahim diagnoses suspects like case notes in therapy, while Celia Imrie’s Joyce bakes three-tiered gateaux that conceal enough secrets to be criminal in their own right.
The murder? Almost secondary. The charm? Immaculate.
Director Chris Columbus doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but he does shine it. The stately halls of Coopers Chase gleam like Downton in semi-retirement. There’s murder, sure, but it’s polite. Someone probably tidies up the blood. David Tennant slinks in as the baddie — all designer suits and developer greed — and exits with a flourish. Richard E Grant drops in with a performance that feels like it wandered off a theatre stage and never left.
And then there’s Jonathan Pryce, breaking hearts quietly in the background as Elizabeth’s husband, lost to dementia — a subplot that adds a whisper of sorrow beneath the hijinks.
The plot is tangled, sometimes wobbly, but never dull. It flirts with daftness in the final act, spinning its cosy-crime plates just a little too fast. But then again, it never claimed to be Broadchurch. This is murder via garden party — slightly tipsy, endearingly nosy, and with an unexpected second wind.
What it lacks in bite, it makes up for in banter. The film knows it’s charming. It practically dares you not to smile when Mirren’s Elizabeth bans the word “feisty” or when Daniel Mays’s sweet-toothed DCI looks like he’s solving the case purely to get back to his chocolate stash.
Yes, it’s safe. Yes, it’s soft-focus. But it’s also quietly radical in one way: it gives the stage entirely to the old — not as relics, but as razor-sharp, deeply alive characters with agency, secrets, humour, and edge. That might be the most subversive thing about it.
So no, The Thursday Murder Club won’t leave your nerves frayed or your soul stirred. But it will warm you like a perfectly brewed cup of Earl Grey — if that cup was served by someone who once worked in espionage and still knows how to make a body disappear.
Final verdict? It’s not groundbreaking. But it’s gorgeously cast, delightfully self-aware, and entirely too easy to enjoy. Murder has never felt more well-mannered.
IWMBuzz rates it 3.5/5 stars.
