(courtesy IMP Awards)
Murder is a very serious thing.
As is the investigation to solve it which inevitably uncovers all kinds of nefarious intent, impulsive violent action and dreadfully dark consequence.
And yet, somehow, when a murder mystery finds its way to the movies, or in the case of Death and Other Details, a streaming platform (Hulu or Disney+), a whimsicality often creeps in, a sense of playfulness that, done right, allows all that serious criminality to express itself fully and malevolently while having a certain mischievousness to it.
How the two co-exist as perfectly as they do is a mystery throughout, ahem, a mystery, but co-exist they do and in a way that exposes human nature as as idiosyncratically entertaining as it is darkly disturbing.
There must also be glamour aplenty of course, and Death and Other Details – the title alone has a certain gleeful eccentricity to it – has it in Art Deco spades, set on a glamorous cruise liner, the SS Varuna, built by Sunil Bhandari (Rahul Kohli), which has been built with a keen eye on retro lavishness at every turn.
The towels are vintage, the fittings are of an earlier time too, and the whole air of the place is of Agatha Christie at sea which is no different since the show has borrowed quite liberally but without being crashingly derivative, from Death on the Nile, both in its setting of a boat upon which people are stuck for the duration – nothing like a hothouse environment to amp up the pressure of a body being found and an investigation being conducted – and its sensibility which is of very rich people harbouring secrets doing quiet terrible things to each other.
In the first two episodes, which released 16 January – thereafter, episodes will release weekly until the final two instalments hit the platform on 5 March – we are introduced to an attractively menacing cast of people, all of whom could’ve done it, and with some measure of, in their eyes, well-deserved justification.
But who? Who is the one with their finger on the … well, the murder weapon is worth leaving in the realm of spoilers but it is not, thankfully and creatively, a gun and the person who’s murdered, again they must remain nameless, is not found lying in a prone position which is rather inventive.
Loosed onto the case is down-on-his-luck detective Rufus Cotesworth (Mandy Patinkin) who is on board in the empty of the very rich Chun clan, headed by matriarch Celia (Lisa Lu) whose younger relative Eleanor (Karoline) is the ex-lover of Anna Collier (Lauren Patten) who needs the money the Chuns would invest if her family’s company, overseen still by dad Lawrence (David Marshall Grant), is to stay solvent.
See how intertwined everyone is after just one paragraph of who is who?
Throw in Anna’s wife Leila (Pardis Saremi), a clickbait journalist with serious QAnon-laced PTSD, Anna’s no-hoper brother Tripp (Jake Cytmore-Scott) who’s all charm and no business sense – by way of contrast, Anna is about to be named, so she hopes, as CEO – the Colliers’ lawyer Llewellyn Mathers (Jere Burns), Anna’s mother Katherine (Jayne Atkinson), the governor of Washington state, Alexandra (Tamberla Perry) and priestly political kingmaker Father Toby (Danny Johnson) and his TikTok star son That Derek (Sincere Wilbert) and you have a veritable snakes’ nest of people with the motive and means to do the dastardly deed.
Even some of the crew, from head of security Jules (Hugo Diego Garcia) and crew manager Teddy Goh (Angela Zhou) and the cast of possible murderers grows and grows in deliciously tantalising ways.
At the centre of everything, emotionally and narratively, is Imogene Scott (Sophia Reid-Gantzert as a child, Violett Beane as an adult) whose story of loss and trauma as a child when she first meets Cotesworth runs parallel to and is somehow intimately connected to the death that starts a frenzy of investigation in the 24 hours that the passengers and crew will be alone before Interpol lands on the ship in the form of no-nonsense investigator, Agent Hilde Eriksen (Linda Emond).
Imogene is bruised and broken but also feisty, witty and, as Anna’s best friend and practically a member of the Collier family, which comes with glam trappings but all kinds of emotional weight, eminently capable of looking after herself, and as it turns out, acting as Cotesworth temporary assistant even though everything in her screams to stay away.
As a set-up for a ten-episode series, the first two episodes of Death and Other Details do their job quite wonderfully, and while, yes, it wears its influences very much on its high-end fashion sleeves, it has a ton of fun executing on them, delivering a show that shows great potential to be witty, subversive and entertaining clever in the manner of modern Agatha Christie homages like Knives Out and which dazzles with its ability to be fabulously chic while pulling back the curtain to show the darkness of humanity that scuttles into the shadows at every turn and the blood, power and vengeance soaked into every layered and complex clue.
Death and Other Details streams on Hulu and Disney+