A very sick, very unsophisticated part of me wants to reduce And Then There Were None to this: sheer voyeuristic appreciation for a moment in the fourth act of the second episode. Is it now written into all of Aidan Turner’s BBC contracts that, at some point in any production he’s involved with, he must expose his torso? Am I allowed to recommend that it is? Does that undermine my attempts to pursue a career as a ‘serious’ film critic? Because I think it could feasibly be one of those actorly signatures, like Cary Grant’s combover or Sylvester Stallone’s grunt. I notice that the daringness of the Beeb is increasing incrementally in direct correlation to the growth of Turner’s small screen popularity. In Poldark we cut off at the hipline. In this, the boundary is renegotiated by the strategic lowering of a towel to accommodate a peek of his groin. I think the BBC is laughing at all of us, and as far as I’m concerned, if this is how they plan to get their kicks, they can laugh away. White flannel has never been so erotic, and I have never sunk so journalistically low.
That aside, Turner is a genuinely fine actor, chameleonic in his abilities, and he injects the charismatic element – conveyed via the vehicle of a rather lovely Irish brogue – into what is a very fine adaptation of an Agatha Christie bestseller. The BBC have roared into the wintry season’s predilection for murder and mystery (onscreen, that is) by stripping back the shimmer, turning the heat down to a simmer, and littering a cast of characters with real heavyweights. Charles Dance, Miranda Richardson, Burn Gorman, Anna Maxwell Martin, Sam Neill, Toby Stephens… the list continues. Where the feeling is it’s difficult to compete with the grander-scale productions of CBS or even Netflix these days, they have cast off the strictures of theatricality and, instead, pulled inwards: the sombre, sterile location – a manor on an island in the middle of nowhere – is breathtakingly desolate.
There’s a hint of True Detective‘s Southern Gothic aesthetic blended into the coarse, pastoral nihilism of the better Scandinavian dramas… but just a hint. Big, showy production values have been replaced with an attention, instead, to nuance: director Craig Viveiros commands lingering shots which pause over possible murder weapons. Characters are sharply focused as their faces modulate through various emotions, extracted from them however reluctantly.
Ten guilty souls converge on the island under the impression they are attending for their own reasons; it soon becomes painfully apparent that this is a set-up, that their host is a spectre, and that they are all about to face their reckoning… that is, they’re about to be murdered, one by one. The most pressing question evinces itself as they disintegrate: is the culprit outside their group… or within?
I watched this series with my mother (that is, I forced my mother to watch it with me). In the middle of the second episode she pronounced, through gritted teeth, “this is so… slow.” It wasn’t meant as a compliment. For my mother, a crime thriller is something in Luther‘s vein: tightly coiled around stormy allegro sequencing, chase scenes, mania, histrionic action, demented killers in masks. A hero – however damaged s/he is, s/he must be a hero – tries to uphold the law and, where the law fails, to uphold something more important: morality.
And Then There Were None is very different. To begin with, who is our hero? Everyone is unsavoury. Even the characters we find ourselves most drawn to (thanks to the favouritism of the lens) are either morally ambiguous, like possible child killer Miss Claythorne (Maeve Dermody), or utterly though charmingly ruthless, like Philip Lombard (Turner), a mercenary agent of massacre.
Where Luther or Silent Witness or The Fall is a race against the clock, with the protagonist acting and reacting in an attempt to pin down the murderer, there is no such energy in And Then There Were None, possibly because there isn’t really anywhere to run to and, to be honest, there’s no question of who the murderer is: after all, they’re all guilty somehow. It’s a waiting game, and the languorousness of time becomes a tactic of psychological warfare waged upon the audience as much as it is one waged upon the characters.
I actually believe this is the series’s greatest strength (my mother disagrees, but oh well). There is something refreshing about the stateliness of this descent into madness and disaster: it has all the terrorising inevitability of a classy Saw film. Dark rooms, low lights, terse conversations, paranoia, and the horrible, horrible ineffectualness of stasis – Christie’s most popular novel is her masterpiece of paralysis and here it has been vividly brought to life. People who have formerly been active agents of human destruction are forcibly re-calibrated into positions of absurdly passive haplessness. They make tea and wait to be assassinated. Sarah Phelps’s screenplays are refined things: endurance treks as opposed to hasty sprints, demanding a different but equally formidable kind of stamina. They exhaust us but compel us even so. We’re not asked to like our characters, but we are asked: do we sympathise? Do we not all fear that the ghosts of our past may wreak karmic havoc upon us one day? Can we not see, in their panic and undoing, something of what we, too, might become when faced with our own demise?
Qualms? Some. A cast of such high-calibre actors means that not everyone can claim the screen time they deserve; both Douglas Booth and Anna Maxwell Martin feel offensively underused, but that said, somebody has to die first (and second). It’s not that they underplay themselves, but that talent forces talent to up its game, and by the third episode, where the final five are bringing their self-destructive all, those two pretty impeccable performances have been somewhat lost amongst the din of churning mental chaos. Still, everyone else gets a bigger chance to play to their strengths: Charles Dance is a vision of elegance, Turner smoulders without ever losing credibility as someone with real violence in his soul, and special mention has to go to both Burn Gorman and Toby Stephens, who fall away from their composed, authoritative veneers in truly spectacular fashion. The scene stealer, however, is Maeve Dermody, the ingenue: her reserved, unknowable Vera Claythorne begs to be fully comprehended and is the great enigma who glues our eyes to the screen. She handles the demands of her role with a pursed, slight deftness where actresses with more prestigious resumes would have quickly failed.
And Then There Were None is a particular kind of crime thriller which may only suit a particular kind of viewer. But if you can stomach the nausea of listlessness, the reward is a quality drama which probes at the darkest heart of what it means to be human. Time rolls on towards only one certainty: the end of us. It’s not a case of how, or even of when – but of whether death itself will administer justice to the terrible things we do.
