Having for many people become famous as Alexander Armstrong’s sidekick on the BBC programme Pointless, Richard Osman has since certainly scaled the heights. (He is, after all, 6 feet 7 inches tall.) His 2020 novel The Thursday Murder Club was a terrific success and it has spawned four subsequent novels in the series. They may well make it to the silver screen as the original has done, courtesy of Netflix. It is a thoroughly enjoyable film with an abundance of red herrings.
The cast is a starry affair. The main four protagonists are shown on the home page – from left-to-right, Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Celia Imrie. (To add a little extra sparkle, Steven Spielberg pitched up for the red-carpet launch in Leicester Square.) There is a line in the title track of the latest Nick Cave album, Wild God, that goes: “It was rape and pillage in the retirement village.” There is none of that here but the line came to mind because there is plenty of villainy and no shortage of death.
The story is set at the Coopers Chase retirement village. The Thursday Murder club is a group of residents who meet weekly to discuss cold cases. Kingsley plays Ibrahim, a psychiatrist; Brosnan is Ron, formerly a trade union leader; Mirren is Elizabeth, a retired MI6 officer; while the newest member of the club is Imrie, who plays Joyce, who was a nurse. The (initial) underlying plot involves the ongoing future of the village, with one owner, Ian Ventham (David Tennant), wanting to redevelop the property into luxury flats while his partner, Tony Curran (Geoff Bell), opposes the plan. Within fairly short order, Curran has been murdered in his home and Ventham has collapsed and died after engaging with protestors who are aghast at his project. Cause of death: fentanyl overdose. Deliberate or accidental? Murder or otherwise?
The group are assisted in their endeavours by PC Donna DC Freitas (Naomi Ackie), who informs them that a third man, Bobby Tanner (Richard E. Grant), is/has covertly been involved with the business but he is thought to be dead. In fact, he isn’t: he is running a florists and all the while, Elizabeth and Donna discover, he has been trafficking migrants and retaining their passports, a deeply sleazy business that he has been operating in league with Curran, who is by now definitely dead.
As the conclusion approaches, there remain many loose ends to resolve, not least who killed Curran. I don’t want to spoil any of it with a big reveal but I will mention the case of Bogdan (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), a Polish handyman who works at Coopers Close. The film script deviates a little from the story Osman put into his book as to Bogdan’s role in events, which has predictably displeased some devotees, but then there is no pleasing everyone. And, oh gosh, I haven’t even mentioned what John and Penny Gray got up to!