Summary
In for a Murder has its charms, but it’s a neo murder-mystery without quite enough mystery to sustain a feature.
This review of In for a Murder is spoiler-free.
The way of popular media is imitation. Nothing is truly new, of course; every piece of art borrows something from somewhere, sometimes without even realizing it. But creation has DNA, strands of identity that are passed down hereditarily. In for a Murder is a prime example. It isn’t much like Knives Out, really, genre and some other elements notwithstanding, but you can tell right away it wouldn’t exist without that surprising Rian Johnson hit. Based on a novel by Katarzyna Gacek, it stars starring Anna Smolowik as a bored, borderline abused suburban housewife whose penchant for Agatha Christie and friendship with the local detective Jacek (Pawel Domagala) finds her trying to solve a murder in her quaint little town.
Smolowik plays Magda, whose husband Tomasz (Przemyslaw Stippa) is so cartoonishly awful you want to reach through the screen and slap him until his eyeballs switch places. It’s no wonder she seeks solace elsewhere, mostly in crime literature and taking the dog for walks around town – which is how she discovers a woman’s corpse in the park. Jacek is useless, but surely the nice, meek housewife with the neatly manicured lawn isn’t more capable of solving the crime than he is?
Of course, she is. Magda’s life is so archly miserable that it almost comes full circle and descends into outright comedy; her husband isn’t just playing away but doing so with a ditzy blonde airhead of a type that only seems to exist in sexist jokes. She has a potential love interest in the local, inexplicably hunky veterinarian, but it doesn’t take. Even her best friend went missing, never to return. Because nothing about Magda’s life feels real, neither does her intuitive sleuthing. The litany of potential suspects in the murder includes every archetype imaginable like the whole thing’s a very long game of Cluedo. And of course, the present-day murder might well relate to her best friend’s disappearance, since why even have a missing best friend if you don’t solve the mystery a decade and a half down the line?
Thank goodness for Smolowik then. She’s a comforting presence, doing her utmost to give a simple character some layers and nuance, and I like that we don’t lean so heavily into her generally put-upon lifestyle that the whole thing becomes too miserable to handle. Director Piotr Mularuk gets a lot out of her – or perhaps she just has a lot to give? – while failing to inject much energy into the plot. Comedic scenes aren’t funny enough; dramatic scenes aren’t exciting enough, and so on, and so forth. There was probably a much better movie here if anyone could be bothered to really make it.
What we have instead is an intermittently watchable and well-intentioned mystery that just isn’t that mysterious, stocked with boilerplate characters and ideas that bury what was obviously intended to be a suburban satire and a much weirder movie, if it was just allowed to be. It’s certainly silly enough for a good time, but that hardly seems like a worthwhile return on an almost two-hour investment.
You can stream In for a Murder exclusively on Netflix.
