Roush Review: ‘Murder’ Most Chilling in Iceland ‘at the End of the World’
Review
A Murder at the End of the World
Imagine a Knives Out mystery playing it straight-faced, with a Gen Z tech whiz and citizen detective as the hero, and you might end up with something like the FX-produced A Murder at the End of the World, a stylish seven-part whodunit set in exotic and eerie Iceland.
Into this frigid and forbidding tundra arrives celebrated young true-crime author Darby Hart (The Crown‘s captivating Emma Corrin with punkish pink hair), mysteriously summoned by the inscrutable Steve Jobs-like “king of tech” billionaire Andy Ronson (Clive Owen in heavy-framed glasses). She joins a global conference of change-the-world visionaries at a remote and super-smart (as in AI) hotel. Overwhelmed by the refined company she’s suddenly keeping, Darby shifts into amateur Sherlock mode when bodies start falling.
Cowriter-director Brit Marling, who co-stars as Ronson’s alluring wife Lee, a legendary coder who went off the grid to escape trolls, can’t entirely escape the clichés of the genre in the writing—”I think there’s something going on here that we don’t fully understand,” Darby announces at the series’ midpoint. You think? Few of the suspects and/or victims are fully developed as characters, despite being played by an intriguing and diverse cast including Joan Chen, Raúl Esparza, Jermaine Fowler, Alice Braga, and especially Harris Dickinson as Bill, a renegade conceptual artist who years earlier sleuthed with Darby on a serial-killer case that resulted in her first book.
Their relationship ended when he split, unnerved by her obsessive focus, writing on a bathroom mirror, “I think this is both too much and not enough.” Viewers may have a similar reaction to A Murder at the End of the World, which at times succumbs to streaming bloat, with several episodes going well past the hour mark. And yet there is considerable tension waiting for the next snowshoe to drop, and it’s impossible not to feel those And Then There Were None-style shivers as the gathering hunkers down, fearing the worst as a storm rages outside, trapping and isolating them.
The denouement, when it comes, is ingenious. If Agatha Christie had lived to the digital age, she’d surely approve.
A Murder at the End of the World, Limited Series Premiere (two episodes), Tuesday, November 14, Hulu
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