Agatha Christie's Seven Dials

The Ticking of the Bright Young Things

My relationship with the modern Agatha Christie industrial complex. We seem stuck in a loop of resuscitating her novels, either dusting them off with agonizing reverence or completely ripping them down to the studs to prove how "relevant" they can be. Now comes *Agatha Christie's Seven Dials*, a three-part Netflix adaptation by Chris Chibnall. After spending a few years hurtling through time and space as the showrunner of *Doctor Who*, Chibnall has returned to the genre that actually made his name with *Broadchurch*: the grim business of murder. But this is not a dour coastal tragedy. It's 1925, the champagne is flowing, and the aristocracy is desperately trying to forget the Great War. Whether that friction actually sparks or just creates a lot of smoke depends entirely on your tolerance for narrative whiplash.

The setup is a classic country-house contrivance. Lady Caterham—played by Helena Bonham Carter with a sort of weary, patrician autopilot that I honestly found rather comforting—is hosting a gaggle of new-money industrialists and government lackeys at her decaying estate. Her daughter, Lady Eileen "Bundle" Brent, watches the parade of forced gaiety with an outsider’s smirk. Then, of course, a body is found. Gerry Wade (Corey Mylchreest) turns up dead in his bed after a prank involving a ridiculous number of alarm clocks goes sour. The local constabulary writes it off as a tragic suicide linked to his wartime trauma. Bundle refuses to buy it. She starts asking questions. (Because they always do, do not they?)



There is a specific sequence early on that tells you exactly what kind of show this is trying to be. Gerry lies motionless in his bed, the morning light cutting harshly across his face. Chibnall and director Chris Sweeney give us a bizarre, almost voyeuristic POV shot from the perspective of the alarm clocks lined up on the mantle. The ticking dominates the soundscape, growing louder and more oppressive, effectively drowning out the frantic discovery of the body by the house staff. It’s an interesting swing. It tries to pull us out of the comfortable parlor-room aesthetic and inject a note of modern psychological horror. I am not entirely sure it works, but I respect the attempt to make the machinery of a 1920s whodunnit feel genuinely threatening.

What elevates the material, quite frankly, is Mia McKenna-Bruce. Fresh off her BAFTA Rising Star win for the profoundly uncomfortable *How to Have Sex*, she plays Bundle not simply as a spunky Nancy Drew in a drop-waist dress, but as a young woman using her wit as a shield. Watch the way she holds her shoulders when she's talking to the police—rigid, defensive, projecting an unearned confidence. She brings a restless, nervous energy to a character who could easily have been a flat aristocratic caricature. By contrast, Martin Freeman eventually shows up as Superintendent Battle, offering a masterclass in exhausted bureaucracy. His eyelids do half the acting. He looks like a man who would rather be doing literally anything else than humoring a bunch of rich people and their lethal parlor games.



The problem with *Seven Dials* is not the setup, nor is it the cast. The fatal flaw lies in the pacing and the eventual destination. A three-episode structure should feel tight. Instead, the middle hour sags under the weight of endless exposition, characters explaining things to each other in drafty rooms.

Then the third episode arrives, and the story suddenly remembers it has to be a thriller. We veer sharply from cozy country-house mystery into full-blown international espionage. There is a secret society. There are masks shaped like clocks. Yes, really. As *Roger Ebert*'s Nandini Balial sharply noted in her review, "half of the eventual answer is so obvious that I deduced it within the first episode," and yet the show somehow still manages to make the finale feel entirely unearned.



I wanted to love this. There are flashes of genuine brilliance here, mostly when the camera stops trying to be clever and simply lets McKenna-Bruce and Freeman volley dialogue back and forth. But a mystery needs more than just a good detective; it needs a puzzle that feels satisfying to solve. *Seven Dials* starts with a confident stride but eventually trips over its own tangled shoelaces. It leaves you feeling not so much thrilled by the reveal, but merely relieved that the alarm has finally stopped ringing.