Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Agatha Christie’s Ordeal By Innocence’ On Amazon, Where A Mother’s Dead And All Her Kids Are Suspects

If you’re a fan of Agatha Christie’s many mystery novels, you likely view TV and movie adaptations of her work with a grain of salt. But they’re all usually at least decent, if not great. Where does the adaptation of her 1958 novel Ordeal By Innocence fall on that narrow spectrum?

AGATHA CHRISTIE’S ORDEAL BY INNOCENCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A shot of old newspaper clippings about orphans who have been adopted by a woman who lives at an estate called Sunny Point. In the background are voices along with screams and things crashing.

The Gist: After we see the death of Rachel Argyll (Anna Chancellor), the matriarch of the Argyll family of Scotland, we skip forward 18 months, to the summer of 1956. The family’s patriarch, Leo (Bill Nighy), has gotten engaged to his young secretary Gwenda (Alice Eve), who is more or less hated by all of Leo’s kids and criticizes the family’s longtime housekeeper Kristen (Morven Christie) for her fat calves. It’s the weekend of their wedding.

We flash back to the period where Leo and Rachel’s son Jack (Anthony Boyle) sits in jail accused of murdering his mother. Leo seems to be convinced that Jack did it, always thinking of him as the black sheep of the family, someone that they love and care for but has always been rebellious. The rest of the kids aren’t so sure.

About those kids: Leo and Rachel couldn’t have biological children, so Rachel took it upon herself to adopt orphans; even Kristen grew up in the Argyll household. Not that Leo had any say; in a flashback scene, Rachel brings Christina and Mickey home and introduces them to their new family, while Leo has a look of, “Um… Were we going to talk about this?”

The Argyll kids all have their own problems: Mickey (Christian Cooke), who served in Korea, cuts and burns himself; Tina Durrant (Elanor Tomlinson) is high-strung and her marriage to her husband Phillip (Matthew Goode), paralyzed in the war, is slipping away; Christina (Crystal Clarke) is always under pressure to be “the good one” and get along with everyone; and Hester (Ella Purnell) hides flasks of booze in the toilet tank. None of them want this marriage to go forward, and they all had issues with Rachel, who home schooled them and was critical to the point of being abusive with each of them.

Into that mix comes Dr. Arthur Calgary (Luke Treadway), who swears he gave Jack a ride to a pub the night of the murder. Leo dismisses him as a liar, and Mickey sneaks into Calgary’s hotel room to warn him away from his family. But Phillip, bored of his in-laws, wants to use the fair doctor to get the truth, or something close to that, out in the open.

Our Take: It’s amazing how long we’ve been seeing adaptations of Agatha Christie’s novels, and shows like the 3-part miniseries Ordeal By Innocence remind us why. It’s layered and complex, but also gives us the Christie-patented structure that’s been copied in pop culture for decades: Someone is murdered, and everyone had the means and motive to do it.

When you have Bill Nighy in your period-piece, upper-crust UK mystery yarn, you know that it’s a quality production. The scenery is lush, the back and forth of the timelines are well-paced, and the twists at the end of part one are pretty surprising. The performances are all top notch — even Purnell, whom we criticized for her winsome performance on Starz’ Sweetbitter.

One thing that strikes us, as fans of Christie’s but not a reader of this particular novel, is that the characters are awfully dark compared to how she usually portrays her suspects. Sure, they all had some sort of beef with the person who got murdered, but the emotional depth of each of the Argyll kids is unusual for Christie. This is because this adaptation has made some changes from the original text, in both character and plot. So if you have read the novel, don’t expect this miniseries to follow that story to the letter.

If you watch with that in mind, you should enjoy what’s a solid, well-acted BBC-produced mystery.

Sex and Skin: There’s an implication that Mickey and Tina had something between them that went very wrong, but we don’t see anything physical.

Parting Shot: We go back to the night of the murder, and Kristen being inconsolable because she found Rachel’s body. We see where everyone (aside from Mickey, who was in London) is in the house at the time, all with a “I wish I had done it” look on their face.

Sleeper Star: We weren’t loving Goode as the “over all this” Phillip, but in his scene with Dr. Calgary, we see the character’s evil mischief come out.

Most Pilot-y Line: Gwenda to Mary: “The thing is… no one hated her more than you.” That line feels like it’s straight out of a 1987 episode of Murder, She Wrote.

Our Call: Stream It. It’s almost impossible for a Christie adaptation to not be entertaining, and this is definitely a good one.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Where to stream Agatha Christie's Ordeal By Innocence