Summary
Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials is quintessentially cosy entertainment, but its broader function is providing a breakout role for Mia McKenna-Bruce, who’s quite brilliant in it.
You don’t need me to tell you this, given the provenance of Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, but it’s a whodunnit. Someone is murdered – a few people are murdered, actually – and it’s up to a plucky, unconventional sleuth to piece together how and why. But it’s also very obvious that the primary function of Chris Chibnall’s three-part Netflix adaptation is to introduce a new heroine who can shoulder the burden of at least one sequel (there are two Christie novels featuring the character) and perhaps – this in a bit of a whisper – an entire franchise. Ultimately, whodunnit doesn’t matter a great deal. Who solved it? That’s the big question.
And it’s important to keep this in mind, because so much of Seven Dials – how it’s written, shot, framed, structured, and performed – is designed to underscore how brilliant Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent is, and thus, by extension, how brilliant and charming Mia McKenna-Bruce is. As it happens, this works pretty well as a mystery, and it’s a cosy, twisty good time for as long as it lasts, but it’s a breakout hit for a fledgling star first and foremost. And in that regard, at least, it’s rather brilliant.
McKenna-Bruce is brilliant, you see. This isn’t the kind of performance that’ll win anything, but it’s the kind that’s really note-perfect in every aspect. Bundle is the daughter of Lady Caterham (Helena Bonham Carter, Enola Holmes), a disgruntled widow who has become antisocial and increasingly broke since the deaths of her husband and son in World War I. As a result, she’s forced to rent out her stately country pile, Chimneys, for the season, which makes it the perfect setting for a lavish party full of movers and shakers where, yes, one of the partygoers ends up dead in mysterious circumstances.
This is coming immediately after a very well-shot opening that finds Iain Glenn being gored by a bull, a moment slightly undermined by some wonky CG – this isn’t the last time computer-generated embellishment stands out, either – but nonetheless suitably mysterious for a cold open. You don’t need me to tell you that Glenn’s connected to the death of Gerry Wade (Corey Mylchreest, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story), Bundle’s long-time family friend and potential suitor who served with her brother in the war and now works in the Foreign Office, but it isn’t immediately clear how.
Enter Bundle. She’s unwilling to let Gerry’s death, which seems to be an accidental or deliberate overdose of a sleeping draught, be unceremoniously filed away. For one thing, why would a famously deep sleeper need medicinal aid to drift off? And why would a man who had planned to ask her a personal question the following Tuesday – she assumes it would have been a marriage proposal – take his own life? Gerry’s friends Jimmy (Edward Bluemel, Castlevania: Nocturne), Ronnie (Nabhaan Rizwan, Kaos), and Bill (Hughie O’Donnell) aren’t much help. They can’t explain why the alarm clocks they’d hidden around his room to wake him up were all arranged neatly on the mantelpiece when the body was found, or why one turns up on the lawn outside. Nobody seems to know what the words “seven dials” mean, whether they pertain to the clocks, to a rundown area of London, to an exclusive club, or something else.
I’ll say no more, since the fun is figuring out how it all fits together along with Bundle. But know that the plot unfolds in a relatively pedestrian way. There are plenty of twists and turns, sure, but there are supposed to be. There’s no real effort at subversion here, like the Christie-inspired Knives Out series. The latest one might have been very good, but it’s nothing like Seven Dials, really, and there’s no analogue to Benoit Blanc except a Scotland Yard detective named Superintendent Battle (a moustachioed Martin Freeman), who’s barely in it.
No, it’s all Bundle. This is both a gift and a curse, since, as mentioned, McKenna-Bruce is very good, but the lack of viable suspects and motives means that the mystery, even at only three episodes, feels a bit stretched and unsatisfyingly depth-averse. As soon as a couple more characters are introduced, it becomes quite obvious what’s going on and why. The benefit of having a huge cast of A-listers like in the aforementioned Knives Out and the Kenneth Branagh-starring Poirot movies is that the audience automatically assumes that Johnny Depp, or whoever, wouldn’t have been cast in a nothing part. It breeds suspicion around everyone. Seven Dials doesn’t really have that quality, so while it has the obligatory parlour reveal sequences – though not necessarily always in parlours – they’re not as engaging as they could be.
But complaining too much does seem to be missing the point. Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials is rather explicitly intended to function as a springboard for more of these stories, starring McKenna-Bruce in what will doubtlessly be a breakout role, and it performs that task admirably well. It’s easygoing stuff well-suited to a short weekend binge, and it should do well enough that Bundle will have a new mystery to solve in the near-future. Maybe Martin Freeman will get more to do in that one.
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