The Thursday Murder Club

The Weight of a Good Cup of Tea

There’s a very particular trick to making a movie about aging without turning it into a dirge about death. I’m not convinced Chris Columbus quite nails that trick in *The Thursday Murder Club*, but the film radiates such easy warmth that it’s hard to resist for long. Richard Osman’s 2020 novel became a phenomenon because it wrapped the mechanics of murder in the soft, well-upholstered comforts of an English retirement village. Columbus—whose fingerprints are all over millennial childhood thanks to *Home Alone* and the first *Harry Potter* films—brings that same broad, reassuring touch to the adaptation. Depending on your mood, it either feels like comfort food or like comfort food laid on a little too thick.

The setup is sturdy enough to carry plenty. Inside the manicured calm of the Cooper’s Chase retirement community, four residents gather every week in the jigsaw room to obsess over cold cases. Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) is a retired MI6 operative with steel in her spine; Ron (Pierce Brosnan) is a loud former union boss; Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley) is a soft-spoken psychiatrist; Joyce (Celia Imrie) is an ex-nurse and the audience’s doorway into the whole thing. Then, naturally, a very fresh corpse appears. A property developer played by David Tennant with maximum oily relish winds up dead, and the club gets the real case it has been waiting for.



What caught my attention first wasn’t the mystery itself, which moves with a slightly busy, connect-the-clues energy, but the way the film looks at older bodies. Hollywood usually treats aging as either tragedy or punchline. Here, age gives the characters leverage. Mirren, who has said she all but willed this role into existence after reading the book, gives Elizabeth a still, calculating frostiness. There’s a small moment where she’s holding a teacup during an interrogation, and it tells you almost everything. Her grip is feather-light, her shoulders loose, but her eyes are absolutely at work. It’s economical acting of a very high order.

That said, Columbus can’t always resist reaching for the broad laugh. Laura Miller wrote in *Slate* that he is sometimes "constitutionally incapable of resisting the temptation to wring laughs out of women in their 70s swearing," and you can feel that tendency here. A few scenes lean too hard on the novelty of elderly people doing naughty things, which flattens characters who are sharper on the page. I kept wishing the movie trusted silence and stillness more often. The richest parts aren’t the forced comic beats with the local police, but the late-night glasses-of-wine conversations where irrelevance hovers over everything being said.



Brosnan is especially good at finding the sadness underneath the bluster. After years of tailoring his charm into men like Bond and Thomas Crown, he seems genuinely freed up by playing somebody whose tools are mostly stubbornness and volume. Ron is belligerent, yes, but in the moments when no one is looking, his posture sinks in a way that gives him away. There’s a brief bench scene with Kingsley near the middle of the film—nothing flashy, just two men sitting together while the world keeps moving past them—and it carries real emotional heft.

Eventually you realize that was Osman’s real subject all along. The murder mystery is the frame. The thing inside it is a story about refusing erasure.



The third act gets messy. Motives, names, and plot turns start flying at you with the uneasy speed of a screenplay suddenly aware it still has a whodunit to solve. By the time the killer is unmasked in a rather perfunctory info-dump, the answer to the mystery barely matters. The pleasure is in watching this group needle, outwit, and outlast everyone around them.

I left feeling like I’d eaten an excellent dessert that maybe should have been served in slightly smaller portions. It’s rich, comforting, and not remotely life-changing. Still, Imrie’s face in the final minutes—a tiny, shifting map of grief edging toward purpose—has stayed with me. *The Thursday Murder Club* may get tangled in its own plot, but it knows exactly where its heart lives. It understands that the need to matter, to be useful, and to make a little trouble doesn’t expire.