And Then There Were None, BBC One

None, or two? Only the tiniest whiff of spoiler is involved in pointing out that while the stage version, or at least the one I saw with an actor friend playing an early victim, settled for a semi-happy ending, this magnificently brooding adaptation in three parts – just the right length, surely – dooms us to ultimate discomfort, as an especially merciless Agatha Christie intended.

Not least is the sticky problem of the original title and the way it refers to objects pictured within – here, in Sarah Phelps's clever screenplay ten jade soldiers, linked briefly to a deeper interwar theme, which Miranda Richardson’s nasty-prim Emily Brent (pictured below) refers to as "rather primitive" (for which read “phallic”– though elsewhere naughty unChristiean expletives and unseemly habits like coke-sniffing aren’t avoided). It’s hard to believe that the Fontana paperback copy I bought in the 1970s with my pocket money and frightened myself to death still had the offensive title, and an especially bizarre cover to match. I suppose it was at least grammatical while racist, which "were" as applied to "none" of the present labelling strictly isn't.

The location, apart from the obvious Cornish mainland and beach scenes? Christie supposedly modelled the setting of her isolated house party from hell on Burgh Island Hotel off the south Devon coast, recently restored to its full expensive glory, but as it’s reachable from the mainland at low tide, that wouldn’t do. Director Craig Viveiros’s choice? They’re not saying, but it looks like magical Lundy Island, topped by what has to be a CGI country house (the close-up exteriors and interiors are of Harefield House, Hillingdon, duly deco-ised). In an early scene Anna Maxwell Martin as a tormented servant hovers, if I’m not mistaken, over the geological feature known as the Devil's Cauldron on the west of Lundy. The lights on the island are among the glories captured by the atmospheric, flawless filming.

The cast was about as good as it gets. Star names are not always a guarantee of long-term survival, rather the essential mix is one of superb old hands and attractive youth. Quality was guaranteed by Richardson, Sam Neill’s army man, Charles Dance’s cool, collected judge and Toby Stephens as an hysterical surgeon (canny placing for an occasionally hysterical actor). Burn Gorman lent a Dickensian twist as a superficially comical weak arm of the law.

On the glamorous side were Maeve Dermody's anxious, not-quite-ingenue and two splendid specimens of male eye candy, the pretty (Douglas Booth) and the rugged (Aidan Turner, eyes magnificently smouldering from the off). In fact it’s now easier to imagine the crinkly-haired Ross Poldark of recent BBC fantasy as a potential James Bond thanks to the DJ and the smart haircut – bringing him closer, looks-wise, to a short-term Bond, Timothy Dalton – and stripping to the waist was bound to be obligatory. Of course the scene featuring the fine torso of this version's Philip Lombard (pictured above, Turner with Dermody) was absolutely indispensible, wasn’t it?

Well, almost. Undress goes hand-in-towel with the cunning, steady deconstruction of period-drama gloss. Things and people fall apart as sleep, trust and propriety go out of the window. Sex rearing its head certainly isn't too improbable, just a subtexting of what's already latent in the book. The serialisation also has extra layers of flashbacks and ghosts of the soon-to-be victims' unsavoury pasts (cue an extra turn of the bloody screw). And the end, while faithful to the original's chill conclusion, is even more cruel.

A well-behaved review simply can’t give away any of the twists, only admire how immaculately plotted both the original and the adaptation both are. There’s no reassuring detective to right all wrongs like Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, only a fiendish stage-manager a good deal more convincing, because until the end unknown, than Vincent Price in Theatre of Blood. If, like me and millions of others, you already know whodunnit from having read the book, even if you can't remember the whys and wherefores of the murders, it's still bound to make your flesh creep and your stomach knot.

• The Witness for the Prosecution reviewed on theartsdesk