Agatha and the Midnight Murders (2020)

Agatha and the Midnight Murders has a deliciously literary hook: it drops you into the Blitz with Agatha Christie herself, turning her anxiety, ambition, and razor wit into the fuel for a classic locked-room-style night of suspicion. The film’s greatest pleasure is its atmosphere—sirens outside, secrets inside—and the way it lets a motley hotel full of strangers feel like a living Christie puzzle box without leaning on cheap twists. Helen Baxendale gives Agatha a steely, human edge, and the story’s moral grayness—money troubles, artistic control, and survival—adds a dramatic bite beneath the mystery. It’s more of a moody, stagey chamber piece than a slick modern thriller, but if you want a cozy-adjacent whodunit with wartime tension and a meta wink at Christie’s legacy, it’s an inviting night in.

Agatha and the Midnight Murders wants to be a cheeky, Blitz-era “Agatha Christie meets locked-room thriller” where the author herself gets dragged into a night of escalating hotel killings. The problem is it plays like an undercooked stage piece: cramped and talky, with plotting that lurches forward and characters who often feel like broad sketches rather than people you can invest in. The tone is especially wobbly, trying to juggle dark humor, horror-ish beats, and Christie pastiche without landing cleanly on any of them, and the dialogue leans heavily on coarse language in a way that can feel more grating than edgy. If you’re here for clever, tightly wound mystery craftsmanship, you may leave irritated, but if you can tolerate a messy setup for the novelty of “Agatha as protagonist” and a few solid performances, it might still pass as a one-night curiosity.