A murder at the end of the world

How could I miss A Murder at the End of the World? It came out last year and is an artful sci-fi crime thriller for Gen Z from Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij. It's on FX on Hulu, Disney in the UK, and there's actual physical media too. It's quite a wild ride, on a par with their previous big screen collaborations The Sound of My Voice and The East. And like their TV series The OA, there are imperfections and moments that will make you groan and roll your eyes, but that's mostly because there are imaginative risks taken in almost every scene. There's just nothing conventional about an Agatha Christie 2.0 update that has everything, and that means everything, like hacking pacemakers, oxygen helmets, and garage doors, plus AI suspects, robot armies, AR video game realities, and a touch of autosomal dominant compulsive helio-ophthalmic outbursts, aka (ACHOO) syndrome.

Darby Hart (Emma Corrin) is an amateur podcast detective who arrives at a literary event/book signing without much fanfare. We have flashbacks to her investigation in Iowa into a serial killer with the like-minded Bill Farrah (Harris Dickinson). Dressed in their matching rat-tail mullets from Limahl, the two detectives Darby and Bill lost touch at the start of the series, but they both find themselves on the guest list for an exclusive tech retreat: “Only Murders in the Bunker.” The party is set in Iceland and hosted by moneyed tech magnate Andy Ronson (Clive Owens) and his wife Lee Anderson (Marling). The other guests range from smart city designers to activists, artists and influencers, but Darby’s reunion with Bill is short-lived: Bill dies under suspicious circumstances and almost everyone in the group has something to hide…

“A Murder at the End of the World” brings a welcome dash of sci-fi technology to the conventional “locked room” thriller; the murder methods are original and the solution is impossible to guess, although there are plenty of meaningful hindsight clues once the solution is established. Tech mogul Prospero has become something of a cliche, but Owens plays Ronson with a bland familiarity that makes him an equal to Hap (Jason Isaacs) in “The OA”; disparate groups of individuals pitted against urbane British authority figures are definitely a theme in Marling and Cal Batmanglij's world.

While it's a bit reminiscent of Silence of the Lambs, Darby also has a relevant backstory: her father was a coroner, and the sight of the dead little girls piled high inspired her to investigate the injustices done to women in general. It's a powerful idea, but one that's not entirely relevant to the specific adventure being explored here; solving the problem requires more Darby Hart. A Murder At the End of the World was apparently the top-grossing series worldwide the week it was released, but nobody told me about it; this is a perfect binge-watch with just the right number of breadcrumbs to follow. Somewhere between Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, The Three Investigators, and Blade Runner 2049, this is a fun, engaging series that should continue to do well at FX, Disney, and hopefully beyond…