Murder Mysteries are All About Making the Formulaic Feel Fresh
Death on the Nile is bad. The Afterparty is good. Here's why.
A Note to Subscribers
I’m officially a full-time working man now, and as a result Cansler Culture’s previous Friday releases aren’t quite as do-able. Moving forward, you may notice some inconsistency on Cansler Culture’s release date as I try to figure out when will work best, but rest assured, I will eventually settle on an exact day of the week for release and you’ll continue to receive the weekly word on politics and pop culture.
No Polls, Just Vibes
The weekly word on politics, (usually) free of polls.
News about the Ukraine crisis continues to move too quickly to track down. Here’s what you need to know right now, and here’s some live updates on the situation from CNN.
Weeks of protest in Ottawa, Canada are largely over, as police arrested 170 people in the parliament area.
African and European leaders gathered in Brussels last week for an AU-EU summit. My new employer, World Politics Review, published this great piece about why the EU suddenly cares a lot more about Africa.
Murder Mysteries are All About Making the Formulaic Feel Fresh
There’s actually a specific moment when I knew that Death on the Nile — the recently-released film adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel — was bad. (And no, it wasn’t when Gal Gadot said the now infamous “enough champagne to fill the Nile!” line, if that’s what you’re thinking).
The moment is about thirty minutes in, when Gadot’s Linnet Ridgeway and Armie Hammer’s Simon Doyle are celebrating their marriage and realize Doyle’s ex-fiancee has arrived at their reception. The scene cuts from simplistic camerawork to a bird’s eye view shot that is so dramatic it looked like it was ripped from the cutting room floor of a Chanel No. 5 ad, before returning to those simple shots from before. It was such a ridiculous inconsistency in tone that I genuinely thought, for just a moment, that the film may be a melodrama. It was not.
That moment proved what I was already starting to think: that this was a film with a complete lack of cohesive creative vision, which is one of the benchmarks of an effective murder mystery film.
After all, murder mysteries are, by necessity and by design, formulaic. There has to be a murder in order for the audience to be interested. There has to be detective work to start putting the puzzle together. There has to be a reveal as to who the killer was. Without a cohesive and original style, there is nothing that would keep the audience interested in the world of the film, and more importantly, nothing to set Death on the Nile apart from any other formulaic murder mystery.
A cohesive style, though, isn’t enough. At the bare minimum, a mystery needs to remain intriguing and suspenseful throughout. After all, audiences are there because they want to be kept on the edge of their seat.
Somehow, Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile adaptation fails on both accounts, despite pulling so heavily from one of Christie’s best works. While the film has a beautiful aesthetic, it also lacks, in both writing and cinematography, any sense of consistency. There are numerous moments, sometimes even within a scene, that it seemed like the film had been handed off to a completely different creative team who then tried to awkwardly piece the work they did to the old work like some kind of Frankensteinian filmmaking monster.
And maybe those flaws could be forgiven if the writing at least maintained a level of suspense to keep you interested, but even aspect of the film is a failure. Christie’s original work is full of “oh my god” moments that change everything you thought you knew about the plot at hand. Branagh’s adaptation attempts those moments, but because of poor pacing, ends up rushing too quickly to truly create suspense.
More successful — somewhat surprisingly — in this genre this year is The Afterparty, a new Apple TV+ eight-part comedy miniseries about a murder that occurs at a high school reunion afterparty. The series is stacked with some of the best B-list sitcom actors in the industry right now (as well as Tiffany Haddish) and as such is hilarious end-to-end. More importantly, though, the creators have a clear understanding of how how to keep the formula of a murder mystery fresh by giving it a cohesive and original style.
The central idea to Afterparty is that, as in life, every character has a different perspective of the truth, and as a result each episode is told from a different character’s point-of-view. That alone isn’t particularly original, of course, but the show goes a step further by making each person the main character in their own movie, and gives each episode a different famous movie genre to pull its structure and tropes from. For one character, their night was a rom-com. For another, a film noir thriller. For yet another, a musical.
There are of course times when this idea can feel gimmicky (even cringey), but for the most part, the writing is both funny and intriguing enough to make it work. Plus, this plot structure means that the audience’s ideas of what actually happened are constantly changing, making it harder and harder to piece the puzzle together. The more you learn, the less you really know, which keeps you coming back for more.
And while by no means is The Afterparty the best onscreen murder mystery of late — that designation of course goes to the untouchable Knives Out — this series clearly understands what Death on the Nile doesn’t: the key to a good murder mystery isn’t the mystery. It’s making the formula feel fresh.
Further reading:
The Atlantic’s great exploration of the larger questions about perspective and truth at play in The Afterparty.
The Weekly Soundtrack
Semi-regular contributor Sam Signorelli and I saw Bad Suns in concert this past weekend, and as a result I can’t get their good-vibes-only indie rock bangers out of my head. Highly recommend. Here’s their setlist: