Towards Zero, BBC One review - more entertaining parlour game than crime thriller

The BBC’s latest “cool” Agatha Christie adaptation has many hallmarks of the decidedly dark ones that were considered prestige Christmas treats until recently. But although it’s lovely to look at, it’s low on chills and thrills.

The 1944 Agatha Christie novel it’s based on, later a play, has been given a makeover by Rachel Bennette, whose reworking winds back the clock to the mid-1930s. We get the usual moody coastal setting with raging seas and lowering skies, and gloomy interiors that are so underlit you can’t see what’s happening at crucial points. Sunny south Devon this is not. But the date means the Burgh Island Hotel can be used as a key deco setting again, as in Poirot. Here, bright young things gather to party, infuriating a local grandee whose neo-classical pile, Gull’s Point, just along the coast, is the gestation point of the crime.

The characters have also had a makeover, one becoming a relative of the owner of Gull’s Point, Lady Tressilian (Anjelica Huston). Nevile Strange (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) is no longer her ward but her nephew, a rugged international tennis star whose divorce from glamorous blonde Audrey (Ella Lily Hyland, pictured right) and remarriage to sultry brunette Kay Elliott (Mimi Keene) produces front-page tabloid headlines and crowds massed outside the divorce court. It will be the only court he appears in if he emerges disgraced.

Also promoted by the adaptation is the novel’s junior policeman, now Inspector Leach (Matthew Rhys), called in to investigate, though he seems a suspicious character in his own right, a former army officer still shellshocked by the carnage of the trenches. His drunken attempt at suicide is the dramatic highlight of episode one.

Gradually over the two following episodes actual murders are committed and the suspects are, as is standard procedure, coralled in the drawing room. But then they are reshuffled by Leach as new evidence pops up, then reshuffled again. He becomes an anguished version of Columbo, asking that one last question that trips a switch and off we go on a new line of inquiry. 

The inspector has been given material by the script that includes not just the various Stranges, all of whom have conveniently ended up holidaying together at Gull’s Point, but Lady Tressilian’s companion, Mary (Anjana Vasan), who has surreptitiously been communicating with Thomas (a suitably jittery Jack Farthing, pictured below with Vasan) out in Malaysia. He's another nephew of her employer, but banished abroad by her.

Thomas hates Nevile, an enmity that goes back to an incident in their childhood. There’s also the family solicitor, Mr Treves (Clarke Peters), accompanied by his kleptomaniac ward Sylvia (Grace Doherty); a thuggish valet Nevile acquires, Arthur McDonald (Adam Hugill); a suspicious type, Louis Morrel (Kalil Ben Gharbia), who haunts the nearby hotel and “fixes” people’s desires; and a cook (Jackie Clune) who’s devoted to Nevile. We are invited to put those characters in various configurations before the final credits roll: was the killer working alone? If not, who abetted whom? 

The script opens with Treves opining mellifluously to the camera about how to fathom the origin of murder plots, the point zero where the plan is conceived (hence the title). Which, more or less, turns out to be the method the adaptor uses: we join the story eight months before the first murder but then stop to revisit the pasts of the lead characters here and there. Nevile and Audrey were childhood sweethearts: do they still love each other, even post-divorce? Is Kay really in love with Nevile? What is her connection to Louis Morrel? 

There are no gruesome shocks, despite the Psycho-ish music brought in to engender alarm; in fact, it’s all a bit sedate. But the production values are lavish, and the casting is mostly attractive. Rhys is always fun to watch, a mercurial actor who can move from larky to homicidal in a split second. He is ably abetted here by Vasan, who makes the most of every shot she’s in, with expressive side eyes and pitch-perfect articulacy. Huston, whose character has a Miss Havisham air, resists the temptation to ham it up, and Farthing is his usual period-appropriate self. Only Jackson-Cohen is somewhat problematic, a man who should be instantly recognisable as a golden-boy seducer but comes with a built-in dark side. 

Little of this seems particularly novel, to be honest: it’s the MO of most Agatha Christie plots. And it’s a Christie with no seemingly insoluble mystery – the corpse in the locked room, the murderer with a secret identity, and the like. As often happens, the minutiae of the plot are better understood by the scriptwriter than by the audience, and there is a faint whiff of a forced gimmick in the denouement, but it’s slim pickings. Approach it as an entertaining parlour game rather than a crime thriller. 

• Towards Zero continues on BBC One on Sundays at 9pm. All three episodes are available on iPlayer