A murder mystery set at a luxury coastal resort filled with wealthy, glamorous, hateful suspects? Somebody should make a TV show about that.
Somebody has, other than the makers of HBO’s eat-the-rich satire The White Lotus. The BBC’s latest Agatha Christie adaptation Towards Zero is a stylish whodunnit with a cast so good looking they could be whispering sexy come-ons to camera in high-end perfume ads. Thankfully, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Ella Lily Hyland and Mimi Keene are in this instead, a three-parter about horny toffs, suspicious overseas cousins, and a detective on a redemptive journey.
Nevile Strange (Jackson-Cohen) is a famous tennis player whose beautiful wife Audrey (Hyland) is divorcing him on grounds of adultery with the also beautiful Kay (Keene). Their love triangle travels from the newspaper front pages to Nevile and Audrey’s childhood home of Gull’s Point, a stately home perched over the idyllic Devonshire coast. There, the unhappy threesome engages in some Olympic-level seductive pouting and accusatory glaring, which is luckily interrupted by a murder. Enter: local Inspector Leach (Matthew Rhys) to knock these glamorous heads together and shake out the culprit.
Gull’s Point is presided over by matriarch Lady Tressilian (Anjelica Huston, making her British TV debut) and her paid companion Mary (Anjana Vasan). Her Ladyship runs the firm from her well-appointed bedroom complete with views of the sea in which her late husband’s yacht sank (she watched it happen and now gazes at the waves saying icy things like “the sea decides”). She’s the boss of this bunch of orphans, nephews and wards on whom, with varying success, she attempts to impose her will.
Lady Tressillian’s will, and the changes she’s making to it, are of interest to the “brood of vipers” – as she calls them – writhing around her ankles. Her fortune creates a contest between its various claimants, but the real rot of these characters was set in long before now. A story unspools of childhood rivalry and hidden secrets that you’ll forget by the time the credits have rolled. What endures of Towards Zero is its glittering style, and Matthew Rhys’ Inspector Leach.
Leach (a new composite character based on several in Christie’s 1944 novel) is Towards Zero’s main success. His journey from disillusionment to belief is the story’s emotional foothold, thanks to Rhys’ poignant depiction of a man destroyed by the First World War and casting about for a reason to continue. Without him, this three-parter about the horrid rich would have all the pathos of an episode of Real Housewives – great outfits and enviable decor, but where’s the humanity?
It’s a glam story of the kind you’d carry home from the shop in a crisp-cornered bag with ribbons for handles. There’s none of the grime or sweaty deviancy of Sarah Phelps’ recent Christie adaptations (for context, I loved every sordid syllable of those), and none of their politics, despite being set in the 1930s – a time when no aristocratic country house was complete without at least one resident Fascist. The looming Second World War apparently casts no shadow on Gull’s Point.
Instead, this is a traditional head-in-the-sand Christie adaptation from screenwriter Rachel Bennette and director Sam Yates, one more interested in gorgeous 1930s tailoring and simmering looks exchanged over the fish course than it is in 20th century history. It’s diverting and sizzling, but doesn’t quite get under the skin of its twisted characters. Nor does it deliver on the promise of a lighter Christie. Huston, Hyland and Vasan, all talented comedians in other contexts, are straitjacketed by the demands of a melodramatic plot and unable to add lightness to this intense story. Clarke Peters as family lawyer Mr Treves does manage to cut through the turgid atmosphere with a twinkle and the kind of sonorous voice any TV show would kill to have as its narrator.
Treat it as a murder minibreak: three hours in sunny Devon that you certainly won’t regret spending, but – Rhys’ poignant performance aside – won’t trouble you much after they’re over. Bon voyage.
Towards Zero starts on Sunday March 2nd at 9pm on BBC One. All episodes will be available on BBC iPlayer.
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