Darby (Emma Corrin) publishes a book about how she caught a serial psychopath. During a presentation in a bookstore, reading the final chapter allows us to understand the extent to which she was defined by both her experience and her relationship with Bill (Harris Dickinson), her accomplice in the amateur investigation. After the event, she receives an invitation through an artificial intelligence.
The couple formed by a millionaire entrepreneur (Clive Owen) and his hacker of reference (Brit Marling) invite her to spend a few days in a remote hotel in Iceland. There she gets three surprises: the rest of those gathered are the elite that can contribute to combating climate change, Bill is one of them and, before the first night ends, after dinner, Darby finds a body.
The formula of Murder at the End of the World (Disney), Agatha Chrstie's Ten Negritos or the comic A Corpse for Desserts, is as iconic as it is trite, especially now that Rian Johnson exploits it with the Daggers in the Back franchise . The main question, therefore, is whether its authors can manipulate the commonplaces of the subgenre and the structure in their favor.
The question answers itself when you see who the creators are: Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, the artistic couple of The OA, one of the most unclassifiable and stimulating works of the last decade. It was a dramatic, supernatural and fantastic ode to the transformative power of art and stories and then transformed into an eccentric and reddish spell in a noir key.
Murders at the End of the World, by comparison, can be interpreted as Marling and Batmanglij's foray into commercial fiction. They take the bases of this mystery subgenre so that it is accessible and can appeal to the general public. They explore both the landscapes of Iceland and the United States of the roadside motel and the circular design hotel in the middle of the snow.
Darby, who is heir to Lisbeth Salander, has a bloodhound instinct in an interesting composition by Emma Corrin for the way she uses her apparent physical fragility. And of course, each episode ends with a revelation or clue that compels you to watch the next one. The durations vary depending on the narrative needs and the form that the sequences take: the first episodes last 60 minutes, the end of the second act (that is, the climax of the knot) offers 75 minutes more than justified and, When it comes to the outcome, 40 minutes is enough.
But adapting to a recognizable mold does not mean a renunciation because they take it to their field. They are atmosphere designers like directors and, when it is time to go down to hell, they transform the footage based on the protagonist's mental state. They have fun with the cryptic nature of the human essence when writing the secondary ones (some of them, it must be admitted, are no more than functional).
They demonstrate extreme respect for the dramatic by building Darby from the sensitivity of flashbacks: the minutes allocated to Darby and Bill's past are not so much pieces of a global puzzle as a way of assisting the character of the two characters beyond their captivity in a luxury hotel incommunicado.
And, as for Bill, the character deserves to be revisited in retrospect as an example of new masculinity. Corrin is astute, versatile, fantastic (and automatically stands out from her media Diana of Wales in The Crown) but Harris Dickinson (The Triangle of Sadness) is not far behind when it comes to conveying the non-obvious complexity of her character. .
Between corpses and clues, they discuss contemporary concerns such as the dependence on artificial intelligence, the disturbing messianic gaze with which we see technological entrepreneurs, the different forms of violence to which women can be subjected and our ineffectiveness in the face of climate change. , especially the 1%.
In the final section they run the risk of falling into ridicule, by making these themes compatible with their aesthetic commitment and the affected interpretative sense of Brit Marling as an actress, but her courage and commitment to the story allow Murder at the End of the World to have a hypnotic quality instead of expelling the viewer.
