There’s nothing quite like a good, well thought out whodunit. They have been a popular genre for over a century and I think it is fair to say that the undisputed queen of the mystery novel is Dame Agatha Christie. Her most successful novel, with sales in excess of 100 million, is And Then There Were None which was first published in 1939. It has been adapted several times and in a variety of languages. And, to prove that you can’t keep a good story down, it provides the framework for Invitation To A Murder.
In Invitation To A Murder we have a group of six seemingly disparate people being invited to a billionaire’s private island. Being as the film is set in Britain between the wars, 1934 to be precise, there wouldn’t have been any billionaires. Partly because there weren’t many billionaires in the world back then but also because back in 1930’s Britain a billion wasn’t a thousand million as it is today but a million million so, in today’s system, it would have been a trillionaire sending out the invitations and there were none of those back then.
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We Should Gather In The Lounge
While this is an obvious homage to Agatha Christie there is no Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. Instead we have Mischa Barton as English Rose Miranda Green; a florist with a taste for solving mysteries. Alongside her the other five invitees are an American Donald Walker (Chris Browning), a Spaniard Carmen Blanco (Bianca Santos), a Chinese woman Lu Wang (Grace Lynn Kung), and two other Englishmen Phillip Armstrong (Giles Mathey) and Lawrence Kane (Seamus Dever). So, a reasonably diverse group…what can they possibly have in common?
Now, as the final act denouement revolves around that very question, I’m not going to be spilling any beans. All I’ll say is that I didn’t see it coming! The other things that a Christie-esque feature has to have are a detective, preferably amateur, and a murder, preferably without witnesses and seemingly impossible. The original story, And Then There Were None, which provides the framework for Invitation To A Murder had ten linked deaths. There are far fewer in Invitation To A Murder but, again, I’m not giving the game away here!
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There’s A Murderer In Our Midst
The temptation is to compare Invitation To A Murder with one of the other Christie adaptations; Kenneth Branagh seems to be reinventing himself as Hercule Poirot and I hope he continues working through the other thirty Poirot novels that Dame Agatha wrote. But that would be grossly unfair. Sir Kenneth had in excess of $200 million dollars to make his three Christie adaptions and I’m fairly confident that Invitation To A Murder had nowhere near a third of that amount to play around with. But, as I’ve said many times before, small budget doesn’t mean poor result.
And so it is with Invitation To A Murder. It is a nicely presented, easily watchable, piece of entertainment. One nice fun film fact…Sean, the senior butler, is played by Alex Hyde-White. He is the son of Wilfred Hide-White who featured in the 1965 production of Ten Little Indians as Judge Cannon…Ten Little Indians was also based on And Then There Were None! All in all a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half especially as Mischa Barton is wonderfully watchable as Miranda Green. Invitation To A Murder gets a UK digital release on 30th December 2024 courtesy of Plaion Pictures.
Independent Film Grade: A-
Former teacher, lecturer, homelessness administrator, pharmacy dispenser now happily retired, happily married, and a very happy granddad. I live next to the Mersey but on the side Daniel Craig and Taron Egerton come from rather than the side the Beatles came from!