In the opening scene of the new FX miniseries A Murder at the End of the World, a woman named Darby stands in front of a small bookstore crowd to do a reading from her true crime book The Silver Doe. She is very young, speaks haltingly, and seems determined to vanish inside her voluminous red coat and the hoodie she’s wearing beneath it. As she fumbles through her introductory remarks, audience members begin to stand up and leave, convinced that this odd person has nothing of interest to say. But then she notes that she’s spent a lot of time around dead bodies, begins reciting statistics about how many unidentified murder victims there are in the United States, most of them women, and mentions a Jane Doe that turned up on the edge of her town when Darby was 15. By this point, the customers are practically stampeding back to their seats, and they’re riveted as Darby begins to read from the book.
This was not my exact relationship with A Murder at the End of the World and its creators, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, but I could relate. The pair’s previous series, Netflix’s The OA, is one of the strangest dramas I’ve ever watched, and generally not in a good way. The first season climaxes with a group of kids and one teacher preventing a school shooting through the power of interpretive dance. No, I am not making this up:
The second season was somehow even more bizarre, including a scene where the main character, played by Marling, is puppeteered by a malevolent, telepathic octopus. Again, not making this up:
Where I usually have all the respect in the world for unapologetically odd television, the specific weirdness of The OA — or, perhaps, the lack of an interesting story and characters around that weirdness — just put me off, and I never finished the second season. (Nor did Marling and Batmanglij get to tell their whole story, since Netflix canceled them after a cliffhanger ending to that year.) So I came into A Murder at the End of the World with my guard up, ready to grab my coat and exit the bookstore the moment anything that felt self-indulgent in its freakiness happened. But this is the duo trying to prove they can do something more straightforward and commercial, which turns out to be an Agatha Christie locked room mystery cross-pollinated with some Stieg Larsson Nordic noir, complete with a socially awkward hacker heroine in Darby (played by Emma Corrin). And it turns out that Marling and Batmanglij can play straight very well. By the end of that first scene, I was as engaged with the story as Darby’s audience, and stayed that way throughout most of the seven episodes.
The story plays out in two timelines. In flashback, we see a younger Darby and her boyfriend Bill (Harris Dickinson), a fellow citizen detective, pursuing the serial killer investigation that’s the subject of The Silver Doe. And in the present, reclusive tech billionaire Andy (Clive Owen) invites Darby to participate in a retreat at a hotel located deep in the frozen wilderness of Iceland. Though the summit is allegedly about finding solutions to the climate crisis, Darby — already thrown to see that Bill, now her ex, is also on the guest list — begins to suspect that Andy has a hidden agenda or three. And that’s before guests start dying.
Marling and Batmanglij take turns directing the episodes, and write or co-write all of them (with additional writers in a few cases), and they’ve got the tone and style of this sort of chilly, deliberately-paced mystery down pat. Andy’s hotel is a hi-tech marvel — complete with a seemingly friendly AI helper named Ray, who can appear in holographic form (played by Edoardo Ballerini) — and an engrossing piece of production design, particularly as Darby’s investigation reveals more and more of what Andy has hidden throughout it. And the various victims and suspects are a solid collection of character types — including, among others, other masters of the universe like Lu Mei (Joan Chen) and David (Raul Esparza), artists like Bill and filmmaker Martin (Jermaine Fowler), and other tech geniuses like Oliver (Ryan J. Haddad) and Darby’s hacker idol Lee (Marling herself) — played by an excellent cast.
Mostly, though, there is Emma Corrin, previously best known for playing Diana in the Seventies and Eighties era of The Crown. The sleuth in this kind of whodunnit has to shoulder a heavy load: onscreen nearly the entire time, delivering metric tons of exposition, reacting to new plot developments in ways that are apparent to the viewer but not always to the other characters, etc. Corrin gracefully handles all of this, and commands the frame throughout.
It’s a tremendous star turn, and one that mostly compensates for the show’s biggest creative misstep. In splitting the narrative between the murders in Iceland and the old serial killer case, the creators are trying to help us better understand what makes Darby tick, and what makes Bill so special not only to her, but to many of the retreat’s other guests. But even though the Iceland story intentionally takes its sweet time getting to each place it’s going, it has a clear and compelling forward momentum throughout. The serial killer plot, on the other hand, doesn’t play out in order — it even revisits some moments multiple times to reveal some new emotional facet of what happened — and after a while begins to feel like a stalling tactic for the present-day mystery. It’s valuable to know why Darby and Bill are the way they are in both timelines — particularly to unpack the ways that she has become more comfortable around the dead than the living — but not at this length, presented this way. It’s only the sheer screen presence of Corrin, and their chemistry with Dickinson(*), that keeps those scenes from entirely turning into unwanted distractions after a few episodes.
(*) While the genre all but demands a dour tone, the filmmakers are smart enough to occasionally allow some emotional color to peek into their icy world. Early on, for instance, we see Darby and Bill driving to the scene of what they believe was their target’s first murder, and they begin enthusiastically singing along to “No More I Love You’s” by Annie Lennox when it comes up on shuffle. It’s an endearingly light moment that provides welcome texture to the relationship, and keeps the show from being pure grimness for its own sake.
The sense of mounting danger — from both the elements and the many powerful and arrogant people at the hotel — builds nicely throughout. And the show does its best to make the retreat’s discussions of climate change, income inequality, and the dangers of advanced technology feel like key thematic parts of the story, rather than window dressing. But the ensemble isn’t always used perfectly. You’ll come out of the finale wondering why a few recognizable faces were brought in at all, since their characters barely even qualify as red herrings. Bill, meanwhile, likes to talk about how serial killers themselves are boring, and what matters is the terrifying culture that produces them. The show does a mixed job of carrying that idea all the way through, perhaps running out of room in between all the flashbacks and various suspense set pieces.
Mostly, though, this is a thrilling and compulsively watchable show. When Bill breaks up with Darby in the flashbacks, he leaves her a note explaining that their relationship was both “too much and not enough.” A Murder at the End of the World, though, is pretty much just right. Marling and Batmanglij may want to go back to the abstract stuff down the road, but it turns out they’re very good at coloring inside the lines when they want to.
The first two episodes of A Murder at the End of the World are streaming now on Hulu, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all seven.
