‘A Murder At The End Of The World’ Review – A Gen-Z Noire Whodunit

A Murder at the End of the World is a stylish Gen-Z neo-noir with classic themes. This moody and complex piece of ominous whodunit storytelling is not perfect, but that’s all the more reason to embrace the Britt Marling and Zal Batmanglij series. While the plotting can be clever, the story has some fascinating and satisfying flaws to pick up and debate. Like your family’s Thanksgiving mashed potatoes, you need some lumps to make things interesting.

The story follows an amateur detective turned best-selling author, Darby Hart (Lady Chatterley’s Lover’s Emma Corrin), a punk-rock Sherlock Holmes type full of wonderful flaws and concerning behaviors. The daughter of a small-town coroner, Darby is jaw-droppingly intuitive, having been developed and shaped by her father pulling her out of school and taking her on house calls. Darby doesn’t talk so much to the dead as she can sense what happened to them in their final moments. Darby also extends these talents to a community of online sleuths.

There, she meets Bill (Triangle of Sadness’s Harris Dickinson), a fellow true-crime enthusiast and hacker. Together, they investigate a serial murder cold case that leads them to danger’s front door. This is the basis of Darby’s book, which gained her worldwide acclaim. Darby is then invited to rub shoulders with some of the world’s most impressive professionals. That includes Andy Ronson (Children of Men’s Clive Owen), a billionaire who invited Darby to a retreat and think tank to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.

This is another collaboration for Marling and Batmanglij, who have worked on projects like The East and The OA. They wrote and directed the entire seven-episode series, and it’s a good one. In particular, something you need in a good mystery, in which you have two delicious ones, is a pitch-perfect talent for tone and pace. The series develops a wicked atmosphere that hardly lets up.

This is felt throughout both timelines as the narrative jumps back and forth to each murder. That could easily take the audience to the experience, which is no small feat. That accomplishment allows the viewer to get inside the main character’s head. The writing is so good here that the viewer can see how Darby answers the most intricate questions. I will say that the revelations that lead to the present-day timeline lack a jaw-dropping or mind-blowing quality.

One that goes for starting a conversation about the series’ themes, then takes big swings at a plot twist. In fact, one positive aspect of the series also shines a light on a weakness. The series’ backstory is more intriguing than the larger narrative. The result is that the story feels slightly uneven after spending more time with Owen’s Ronson. We suspect this resulted from inflating a storyline to embrace a bigger star and a deeper cast. However, did we need an episode that leads to a throwaway car crash we have seen hundreds of times before?

Those minor complaints hold the show back from being truly great. What is remarkable are the lead performances from Corrin and Dickinson. While Dickinson provides heartfelt empathy, Corrin is one of the most complex female characters that has ever graced a television screen. Corrin plays Darby with nuanced grace, inner strength, and toughness like a steel magnolia. Full of emotional depth and internal conflict, showcasing the strengths and weaknesses of her manic and obsessive personality. Corrin is simply brilliant in the role.

If anything, A Murder at the End of the World is a taut, engrossing mystery, but it also has much to say about our current world. It is a gumshoe mystery that gently folds into themes of social isolation, loss of empathy, dependency on technology, and erosion of human connections. Those may be a bit heavy-handed in its finale for my tastes, but this is what binge television is all about.

The first two episodes of A Murder at the End of the World are now available to stream on Hulu with new episodes debuting every Tuesday. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnPl4PuNb5U]