Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials is all about time running out. Clocks tick throughout: on mantelpieces, in pockets, and – most ominously – in a circle of seven around a handsome corpse. It’s a motif that haunts this adaptation of Christie’s 1929 novel: the sense that something precious is slipping away, that the Roaring Twenties won’t last for ever.
That body, found the morning after a lavish country house party, belongs to Gerry Wade (Corey Mylchreest), suitor to Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent (Mia McKenna-Bruce). The police call it misadventure. She calls it murder. What follows is playful and lighthearted, but deceptively shrewd.
Fifty years after Christie’s death, Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall mines this early work for something more spirited than her Poirot mysteries. Far from being another moustache-twiddling, drawing-room whodunnit, here her first venture into literary espionage crackles with wit and intrigue. Unlike the BBC, whose recent habit of tinkering with Christie’s plots – from changing the killer in 2018’s Ordeal by Innocence to the character swap of Murder is Easy in 2023 – earned it considerable flak, Chibnall resists the urge to meddle too much with the source material.
It works – especially if you’ve exhausted Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films yet still crave another Netflix puzzler. Cleaving to a formula the Christie fanbase knows with shivery intimacy, the three-part series feels relaxed and sure-footed in its deployment of thrills and knowing laughs. Director Chris Sweeney orchestrates the jazz-age pizzazz with aplomb, dressing everything up in glitzy, silk-and-sequinned glamour. In his brilliant British thriller The Tourist, he coaxed a memorable turn from Danielle Macdonald, as earnest as it was delightfully awkward.
And if further proof were needed that the director is a dab hand at drawing out nuanced work from young actresses, McKenna-Bruce – a Bafta winner for her role in 2023’s How to Have Sex– supplies this in spades. The script establishes what drives Bundle’s investigation, but it’s clearer still in her performance, all caffeinated determination. She refuses to be sidelined. Refuses to accept convenient explanations when her investigation escalates from domestic tragedy into full-blown conspiracy – Foreign Office secrets, international espionage, the works.
Excellent, too, is Edward Bluemel, most recently seen on stage alongside his former Sex Education co-star Ncuti Gatwa in Born with Teeth. Here, as the roguish man about town Jimmy Thesiger, he emanates a kind of louche ambiguity, while Helena Bonham Carter does a fine line in eccentricity – of course she does – as Lady Caterham, dispensing such wisdom as “One must never thank staff. Where would it end?”
Completing this coterie of beloved British faces is Martin Freeman, a moustached, seemingly unflappable presence as Superintendent Battle, the Scotland Yard detective who finds himself both helping and hindering Bundle’s pursuit of the truth.
While the plot creaks a little in places, Seven Dials is generally a lot of fun, shot through with self-awareness that never curdles into smugness. The camera fixes on the minutiae – from the sumptuous country estate interiors to London’s smoky nightspots – creating a world that seduces even as it unsettles.
Christie adaptations are tricky to get right. Kenneth Branagh’s recent Poirot efforts (Death on the Nile, A Haunting in Venice) felt overwrought and self-important. Better was Hugh Laurie’s spry Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (2022), which leant intelligently into the book’s 1930s milieu, with its labyrinthine plotting deftly laid out. The gold standard remains Sidney Lumet’s 1974 Murder on the Orient Express, which understood that Christie’s clockwork storytelling works best when taken seriously.
Seven Dials sits comfortably in that upper tier. It pulls off the difficult trick of making something feel both nimble and reassuringly familiar – a period caper that glides through gilded country piles and shadowy streets. Perfect escapism, then, in this, the bleakest month: exquisitely timed, wound to perfection, and deadly on the hour.
