“The Thursday Murder Club” is a film of simple pleasures. Set at a community for retirees, the film stars Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie as members of its titular group. Every week these retirees solve cold cases in the jigsaw room of the vast countryside estate that makes up their retirement home. It’s a way to pass the time and get a much welcome thrill amid their otherwise quite quaint lives. Which, as it happens, is also a good way to describe what Chris Columbus’s adaptation of Richard Osman’s bestselling novel of the same name may offer its Netflix audience: as contemporary whodunits go, this is as amiable and inoffensive as they come.
Just as its title values blunt simplicity, Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote’s screenplay sets up the film’s central murder club with pert efficiency. In voiceover, Mirren’s no-nonsense Elizabeth walks us through the current case she, Ron (a gruff-looking Brosnan) and Ibrahim (a timid, anxious Kingsley) are trying to solve: “the case of the woman in white who fell out of the window.” Yes, it’s a wordy and all too literal description, but that’s in keeping with the simplicity that the film and characters insist upon. In trying to crack this cold case (a remnant of the former fourth member of their club, a retired policewoman who now lives in the hospice wing of the luxurious Cooper’s Chase retirement village), they meet a new tenant among them: Joyce (Imrie). A retired nurse hoping to move on from her grief after losing her husband, Joyce is keen to lend her medical expertise to this most unusual group of hobbyists.
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While the opening of the film plays with elements of noir (with black and white cinematography matching Mirren’s voiceover as she details the decades’ old case at hand), “The Thursday Murder Club” soon settles on a brighter tone. Cooper’s Chase is an idyllic, sun-dappled community meant to make the club’s tawdry interest in murderers seem all the more peculiar. Likewise, the airy comedy (boosted by Thomas Newman’s sprightly if familiar-sounding score) insists on the seeming incongruity between the film’s lovely setting and its darker subject matter. There are visual gags — case files scattered around jigsaw puzzle pieces, conversations about blood loss interrupted by Sudoku solving — that insist on finding humor in a pair of old folks taking such morbid extracurricular activities so seriously. But the film wants also winks at such simple punchlines: when mousy Joyce jokes to Elizabeth that she feels like they’re in one of those Sunday night dramas about “two bright-eyed feisty old lady detectives,” she’s summarily scolded.
Yet the tone of “The Thursday Murder Club” clearly wants to play with such references. An audience’s awareness of Mirren’s “Prime Suspect” tenure (and perhaps even her Oscar-nominated turn in “Gosford Park”) is enough to shade Columbus’ film with the trappings of the whodunit genre it both parodies and plays within. And surely enough, the club’s focus soon turns away from their increasingly baffling cold case and onto a more pressing one. When the death of one of the owners of Cooper’s Chase risks putting them all out of their homes, the amateur sleuths embark on the kind of comedic procedural that’s not too far from the ones Joyce was gleefully conjuring in her mind. And at every turn — whether ingratiating themselves with a young police officer (Naomi Ackie) or going toe-to-toe with an ambitious real estate developer (David Tenant) — these retirees use their age to their advantage. Therein lies their strength, they know.
No one deploys that with more ease and cunning than Mirren’s Elizabeth. She’s the one member of the Thursday Murder Club whose career prior to Cooper’s Chase has prepared her with the steely grit to solve a much thornier case than at first glance — one that ties in the mob, a criminal presumed dead and a string of suspects roaming the retirement community. Not that Elizabeth, a careful, serious-minded woman in Mirren’s hands, is all too willing to disclose what she used to do to anyone. “Let’s just say I have a wide portfolio of skills,” she tells Ackie’s DC Donna de Freitas when asked what exactly her vague-sounding career in “international affairs” once involved.
Elizabeth, who lovingly cares for her husband (Jonathan Pryce) as he grapples with dementia, is the straight woman of the comedy. She’s the one who keeps the piece grounded as the film pushes into borderline slapstick with many memorable gags — which include Brosnan doing aqua aerobics in a yellow floatie, Imrie saying “what the fuck” in the presence of kid while riding a bus in a knitted bonnet, Tom Ellis (who plays Brosnan’s son) doing an ice skating routine to Lady Gaga, and Kingsley punctuating his every sentence with a flick of the small notebook Ibrahim carries with him everywhere.
Coming in the wake of “Only Murders in the Building,” the “Knives Out” series and Kenneth Branagh’s take on Hercule Poirot (not to mention an entire true crime media ecosystem), “The Thursday Murder Club” doesn’t feel fresh, but it doesn’t exactly aim to be either. Instead, it banks on its very familiar rhythms —and its game cast — to engage and amuse. The intricate (if not overly complicated) plot may not break new ground, nor do its requisite twists and turns — involving menacing florists, lemon drizzle cakes, immigrant workers and amicable chess games. As a riff on the British whodunit, Columbus’ film is simply a cozy, and perhaps an all too simple, affair — nothing more than a jigsaw puzzle that neither challenges nor frustrates, but only passively entertains.
