THE GAMIFICATION OF DEATH
A Murder at the End of the World takes the genre of whodunits to task
The premise of A Murder at the End of the World, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij's limited series for FX, is familiar to the point of cliché: A group of guests are lured to a remote location that make escape almost impossible. This is the setup Agatha Christie made famous in her
1939 novel And Then There
Were None and the formula Rian Johnson riffs on in his 2022 film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which added an obnoxious billionaire to the mix.
A Murder at the End of the World courts these comparisons with an eye toward frustrating them. (The billionaire is played by Clive Owen.) The seven-episode series is a chilly, melancholic spin on a genre that can sometimes make death downright cosy and detection a game.
Owen plays Andy Ronson, a mash-up of Jeff Bezos and
Elon Musk, with an unspecified illness. It's at the behest of his AI creation, a helpful assistant-type named Ray (Edoardo Ballerini) — that our sleuth, a reclusive young hacker named Darby Hart (Emma Corrin), travels to the high-tech compound he's building in Iceland. Ronson's reasons for wanting Darby there are unclear; she's only 24, and her biggest achievement is writing a memoir. Darby's reasons are simpler: Ronson is married to her hero, a brilliant hacker named Lee Andersen (Brit Marling), who disappeared years earlier after getting doxed and harassed. As Ronson's wife, she appears to do little more than tend to their son Zoomer (Kellan Tetlow).
There's an old theory that whodunits are pleasurable because they mend a rip in the social fabric by restoring the world to order through logic. A Murder at the End of the World shreds that idea. Set in the snowy, unforgiving beauty of Iceland in winter, this show's narrative background is no less bleak: Ronson's guests have been summoned to discuss the end of the world, and to be shown how the rich are preparing. An unexpected death upsets Ronson's smooth operation, and as conditions devolve, the apocalypse they've been discussing in mostly abstract terms starts to creep closer.
Darby, our lens into this rarefied world, learned a lot about dead bodies from her father (Neal Huff ), a forensic pathologist, and spent her youth collaborating with like-minded detectives on Reddit and other forums trying to identify Jane Does that seem like homicides. As crises mount in Ronson's compound, we learn through flashbacks that Darby started to get a little too charmed by incongruous details about certain cadavers that suggested a serial killer at work. She met a fellow hacker and sleuth named Bill Farrah (Harris Dickinson) in the course of these online investigations, and Bill — whose suspicion of technology eventually leads him to abandon it and become an artist — becomes the conscience of the series. He recoils when Darby's passion to understand the killer starts to seem laced with giddiness and something like respect.
The series toggles between past and present, often through the somewhat clumsy device of Hart's memoir about tracking down the killer with Bill. This two-timeline structure is a total bummer. It's also, despite some gimmickry, interesting: The high-tech sterility of Ronson's luxe hotel contrasts weirdly with the motels Bill and Darby stay in, which look and feel the opposite of sterile (you can practically smell them). The road trip the broke couple goes on serves as an analog counterweight to the present-day story, where everything is digitized, and where characters with considerable power, including a Chinese “smart city” architect (Joan Chen), and an astronaut (Alice Braga), are stuck.
Corrin, who played Princess Diana in The Crown, is very good here. Darby's intelligence is believable but not infallible, her mistakes are interesting, and she has enough gravitas to nail a young person's exasperated understanding of the ways she is being condescended to. Dickinson is a revelation. Bill is, at least on paper, a type. But the actor plays him with a kind, tortured inarticulacy.
Parts of the present-day story are thin. There are too many characters to adequately define and develop, and too many competing themes. As a whodunit, however, A Murder at the End of the World holds its own — all while enacting some heart-rending correctives to the genre's bloodthirsty tendencies. It takes guts to couch your jeremiad against the gamification of death in a murder mystery. But Marling and Batmanglij had their reasons. And they work.