(courtesy IMP Awards)
In the grand scheme of things that relax, soothe and put your soul at ease, crime, particularly of the murderous variety, should not rate all that highly.
Surely after all the murder of someone can not come remotely close to putting anyone into a chilled state?
Likely not in real life, but in crime fiction, murder, for the reader, not necessarily the characters involved in the story, can be one of the most escapist things of all.
That’s certainly the case in Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, based on the 1929 Agatha Christie novel, The Seven Dials Mystery, which serves up multiple murders, espionage, power plays, betrayal and intrigue and yet somehow ends up being a cosy blanket type of viewing experience.
Part of that can, of course, be sheeted home to the fact that we are living viscerally through characters like the plucky, tenacious, never-say-die (doubly important in this context) protagonist, Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent (Mia McKenna-Bruce in vivaciously sparkling, impishly fun form) and that we are never in real kind of danger.
That’s hardly a startling insight to be fair – that’s been the draw of crime fiction ever since it was invented and remains even more so in a world beset by all kinds of injustice and darkness where neat endings and justice being served are almost as mythically impossible as unicorns.
But what’s also at work in Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials is a sense of vigorous fun, of people engaged in the most terrifying of pursuits, finding a murderer and getting to the bottom of a conspiracy with international implications, who still manage to somehow summon a sense of playful Englishness.
And by that we mean this sense that for all the murders and skulking about and mysteries cloaked in darkness and the shadows alike, everyone approaches it all with a sense of grin-and-bear-it sangfroid, of making the best of quite a beastly situation, to use an English idiom, and it’s really, quite surprisingly, a whole lot of upper crust English fun.
Should murder be fun?
Well, not really, but as Bundle surges forth, ignoring any and all investigative protocols, much to the bemusement of Superintendent Battle (Martin Freeman), determined to get to the bottom of who murdered her childhood friend and almost-fiancé Gerry Wade (Corey Mylchreest) and unwilling to be stonewalled with coroner determinations, assumptions by detectives and requests by those around her to tamp it all down and just go with the prevailing opinion, you come to adore her crash-and-crash-through approach.
Her approach appears to be willful to some and inconveniently insistent to others, but at heart, she is a good and noble person who simply wants justice to be served; granted, she’s driven by her personal connection to Gerry and another subsequent victim – shhhhh! SPOILERS – but she also has an innate need to do the right thing even if, as happens late in the final act, she has to set aside her own material interests for the right thing to be done.
She is innately a good person and bubbly and fantastically likeable into the bargain which makes all the many twists and turns of this highly entertaining adaptation feel more sing-songy vibrant that they would otherwise be.
In fact, this humble reviewer would go as far as to say that the casting of McKenna-Bruce, along with snappy plotting (courtesy of the seriously talented Chris Chibnall) that keeps things moving smartly along, is what grants Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials such a pleasingly buoyant watchability.
While other characters are a lot of fun to watch in their own ways, it is Bundle who keeps the plot moving but who also energises the other characters, even the incomparable Helena Bonham Carter as Bundle’s hilariously unorthodox mother, Lady Caterham, and who infuses Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials with a zesty, zippy sense of justice being served in the most spirited of ways.
It helps that Christie is a master storyteller, spinning a superbly layered tale that starts as one thing on the surface and which becomes an altogether different proposition at events move on swiftly without sacrificing any of the humanity woven into the story.
The story she has spun in Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, brilliantly adapted to a three-episode arc by Chibnall, would work with just about anyone in the role, racing on with thrilling reveals, red herrings and truthful admissions, but it really excels with McKenna-Bruce in the lead role as she exhibits a bracing range of emotions as the narrative demands, being vulnerable and brace, reflective and daring, hopeful and downcast.
Alas, being a mystery, it’s impossible to comment too much on Bundle’s arc and how she influences and pushes the story and the rest of the characters, who range from one-note, cardboard cutout, there just to be service the story, to fully and wonderfully realised like Bundle’s bestie Jimmy Thesiger (Edward Bleumel), but suffice to say, she is the most protagonistic of protagonists, the wind beneath the sails of a very well-told whodunnit indeed.
Being a woman of impeccable integrity and tenacious grit, Bundle is also the moral centre of the tale, someone who refuses to cut deals or corners or compromise in any way, thus serving a narrative which revolves very much around the very spirit and essence of justice, which sits always at the centre of any take Christie tells.
Thus she is Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials in many important, pivotal ways and the reason why this story, which is fantastically complex to just the right degree, offering intellectual pleasures while still being eminently accessible, works so very, very well.
If you are feeling beleaguered by the world where tinpot would-be authoritarian leaders are amassing wealth while in office and inflicting cruelty on those they are elected to serve, where oligarchs sail mega yachts while those they employ starve and climate change is ignored if there’s a buck to be made, Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials is just the salve your ailing soul needs, an injection of effervescent storytelling, boundlessly engrossing characters, and an escapist quest for justice that will divert you from all the doomscrolling but also leave you a little bit hopeful that maybe good can actually win out in the end.
Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials streams on Netflix.