Many have written and spoken about how aging differs from growing old. All manner of physical decline may await, but that doesn’t mean our love of life has to fade with it. A willingness to keep playing, learning, and embracing opportunities for change is the true fountain of youth. For the septuagenarians helming the Cooper’s Chase retirement community’s very own Thursday Murder Club, their youthful spark comes from gathering in the jigsaw room to dissect the ins and outs of decades-old cold cases. Adapting Richard Osman’s beloved bestseller, director Chris Columbus helms a knotty, lively mystery caper, equal parts methodical procedural and screwball comedy.
When new Cooper’s Chase resident Joyce (Celia Imrie) stumbles across the titular club discussing the death of Angela Hughes, she immediately catches their eye. Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), Ron (Pierce Brosnan), and Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley) track her down, Elizabeth correctly deducing that Joyce not flinching at the photograph of Hughes’ corpse means Joyce has a medical background of some kind. Seeking companionship and sensing a call to adventure, Joyce gladly joins their effort. Meanwhile, Ian Ventham (David Tennant) schemes to gain controlling ownership of Cooper’s Chase so he can convert it into luxury developments and profit. Soon, Ventham’s business partner, Tony Curran, winds up dead, and the club officially has a present-day local murder on its hands. With the fate of Cooper’s Chase in the balance, the four get to work, teaming up with the underappreciated police constable Donna De Freitas (Naomi Ackie).
While not the most well-oiled machine, The Thursday Murder Club chugs along without any significant hiccups. Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote’s script has the tall task of compressing a 400-page novel to fit a two-hour runtime. The film is simultaneously breezy and dense, the neatly capsuled scenes often weighed down by their expository duties but redeemed by a fun, witty verve. Don Burgess’ cinematography creates a snug visual atmosphere, taking cues from Downton Abbey’s sun-washed stateliness. That sophisticated yet artificial aesthetic takes the film into easy-on-the-eyes, TV-movie territory; the world the characters inhabit comes off as playfully hyperreal, lightening the atmosphere throughout, even as the content of the plot enters its darkest territory. This commitment to coziness faithfully translates the source material’s ethos, offering enough of the sort of escapist pleasure fans would expect.
The film’s greatest asset is its game cast. Everyone in the ensemble has a hand in making the proceedings enjoyable, but if there’s anyone to highlight, it would be Dame Helen Mirren. Elizabeth is the closest thing The Thursday Murder Club has to a protagonist, and the story grants her character the broadest range of emotional opportunity to work with. The de facto leader of the team, she has a morally ambiguous past, a husband (played by Jonathan Pryce) who suffers from dementia, and an ability to manipulate outcomes to her liking that would give any canonized anti-hero leading man a run for their money. Tasked with playing the most cunning and the most principled of the bunch, Mirren delivers an amusing blend of steeliness and mischief along with some choice comedic timing.
Thematically, what The Thursday Murder Club investigates is the question of finding meaning and resolution in the face of various forms of vulnerability, including mortality. Just as Cooper’s Chase and the cultural legacy it carries face the threat of obsolescence, so too do the characters — whether due to age, ethnicity, or gender — reckon with being overlooked or forgotten. It’s out of a desire to live fuller, self-determined lives that these characters, in both big and small ways, get up to their hijinks. Yet come the film’s end, there seems to be a shaky line in the sand drawn between the characters who’re allowed to do this and the ones who aren’t. There’s a moral dissonance in the denouement as secrets come to light, and the prevailing sense is that the powerful can get away with their transgressions while the powerless cannot. In the middle are the members of the Thursday Murder Club who, after spending the entire time bending the rules (if not exactly breaking them), settle into a rather moderate position of moral respectability. But based on its design, it doesn’t seem like The Thursday Murder Club is meant for intense ethical scrutiny and more so meant for a comfort watch in your living room while it rains outside. On that front, it checks off the necessary boxes for a good time.
DIRECTOR: Chris Columbus; CAST: Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, Naomi Ackie, Celia Imrie; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; IN THEATERS/STREAMING: August 28; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 58 min.
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