Posted in: FX, Hulu, Review, TV | Tagged: a murder at the end of the world, agatha christie, brit marling, clive owen, Emma Corrin, fx, hulu, Locked-Room Mystery, murder mystery, zai batmanglij

A Murder at the End of the World: Updating Agatha Christie for AI Age

A Murder at the End of the World is Brit Marling and Zai Batmanglij updating and subtly subverting Agatha Christie for our paranoid tech era.

A Murder at the End of the World, on the surface looks like a standard murder mystery but uses the genre to dig deep into ideas while never losing sight of the suspense and twists in a good mystery. It updates Agatha Christie with at least three variations of the locked room murder mystery and, rather than just indulge in pulp, uses every part of the story to highlight its themes and the biggest mystery of all: the heart of its amateur detective heroine.

Amateur sleuth Darby Hart (Emma Corrin) is a Gen Z amateur sleuth and part-time hacker with a low-selling book about the murder she solved gets invited by reclusive tech billionaire Andy Ronson (Clive Owen) to his secret retreat in the snowbound plains of Iceland along with other thinkers, creators, industrialists all considered leaders in their field, and an unexpected reunion with her former love, acclaimed Banksy-like artist Bill Farrah (Harris Dickinson). Andy has gathered them for a retreat to talk about how to solve the world's problems and preview his newest innovation, including his advanced AI creation Ray (Eduardo Ballerina), designed to be an all-around helper and personal assistant to everyone. Darby feels like a fish out of water, thrown off balance by her unresolved feelings with Bill and discovery that her idol Lee Anderson (co-creator and series co-director Brit Marling), a genius hacker who disappeared from public view after getting doxed and harassed, is now married to Andy with a son. Soon the party is thrown into disarray with a death – a murder at the end of the world – and they're all trapped there in a snowstorm with no help coming for days.

The plot becomes a modern-day take on Christie's "Ten Little Indians," where the guests in a house are murdered one by one, and the amateur detective is in a race against time to uncover whodunnit. Darby is herself in danger at any time; there are at least two attempts to kill her. She has no fighting skills, only her smarts, her ability to improvise in a crisis, her hacking skills, her technological know-how, and her infinite curiosity about human nature while hiding the wound at her core. And that wound is shown in a parallel flashback plotline where a younger Darby meets Bill for the first time as amateur internet sleuths tracking a serial killer in a sunny, idyllic Midwestern American landscape that feels like the centre of the world in contrast to the apocalyptic Iceland where the present, even deadlier plot takes place.

Darby makes some reckless, nearly lethal mistakes along the way, but her sleuthing style is different from other detectives: instead of trying to find the motives of the killer, she tries to understand and empathise with the victims, especially when she has a personal connection to one of them. She uses her hacking abilities and enlists Ray as her assistant in collating facts and clues. She's a detective and avenger who operates from knowing she could become a victim herself and chooses to speak for them. She may or may not have trusted the wrong people, chosen the wrong allies until their innocence is only proven when they become victims. For Darby, solving a murder is an act of remembrance for the lost.

A Murder at the End of the World can only work with a melancholic core full of loss and sadness. The murder victims aren't just props to launch the plot but good, decent people whose unjust disappearance from the world is a symptom of the cold indifference of technology that will simply destroy because of the unfeeling logic it was programmed with. Solving the murder doesn't heal Darby's heartbreak, but it enables her to make sense of the world as it gets more chaotic and dangerous. It isn't perfect. It has flaws in pace and momentum but makes up for that in ideas and emotion. It explores the toxicity of social media and doxing, of the abuse of women and their struggle to be heard in the cases of both Darby and Lee, surprisingly current fears about the dangers of AI, the dangerous narcissism of tech billionaires with Messiah Complexes, and apocalyptic paranoia. It's all grounded in Emma Corrin's haunted, wounded eyes and makes you both think and feel. The results are unexpectedly moving.

A Murder at the End of the World is streaming on Hulu.

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