Created by the duo behind “The OA”, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, “A Murder at the End of the World” is a series apart and certainly one of the best of this year 2023. Available on Disney +.
WHAT IS IT ABOUT ?
Darby and eleven other guests are invited by a billionaire to attend a retreat in a remote and beautiful location. When one of the guests is found dead, Darby becomes a detective to prove that it is indeed a murder…
Murder at the End of the World, a series created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij
WHO IS IT WITH?
Revealed in season 4 of The Crown, in the guise of Diana Spencer, the magnetic Emma Corrin plays the leading role in this snowy and disturbing thriller. She plays Darby Hart, a hacker invited to Iceland in a hotel run by a billionaire.
She plays opposite another promising young actor, Harris Dickinson, seen, among others, in the 2022 Palme d’Or, Triangle of Sadness.
As for the secondary characters, we find Brit Marlingthe co-creator of the series, but also Alice Braga (City of God, I Am Legend), Joan Chen (The Last Emperor), Raúl Esparza (Hannibal) and especially Clive Owen in the skin of the mysterious billionaire.
IT’S WORTH CHECKING OUT ?
Isolated on the Icelandic plains, a hotel becomes the scene of a murder and a dance of suspects. The decor is ideal, the shared accommodation much less so. The customers of this establishment are not there by chance.
They chose a billionaire, king of technology – think Elon Musk – for a week. CEO, former astronaut, director… The guests for whom the red carpet was rolled out weigh heavily. So why this murder? What purpose ? And above all, who is the culprit?
With A murder at the end of the world – including the original title, Murder at the End of the Worldfurther reveals its many levels of reading -, the duo Brit Marling And Zal Batmanglij takes a hackneyed genre to better reinvent it.
THE “whodunit” – which can be translated into French as “that he has done ?” – brings together suspects in a setting – often unique – before revealing the identity of the murderer in its final act. The series takes these same codes to take them elsewhere.
FX Networks Emma Corrin in Murder at the End of the World.
We expected no less from the creators behind The OA, a mystical and stunningly powerful Netflix production. In these lunar landscapes, the screenwriters question the power of artificial intelligence – a very current subject if ever there was one – and especially the role that the super-powerful of this world can play in this theme.
In Murder at the End of the World, technology is everywhere: the heroine, a little punkette like Lisbeth Salander from Millenium – played by the excellent Emma Corrin – is a hacker, and the characters are invited and advised by Ray, a virtual man – a sort of Siri, but creepier. Not to mention the hotel, every nook and cranny of which is equipped with cameras and other detectors.
FX Networks
Emma Corrin and Harris Dickinson in Murder at the End of the World.
Drama, futuristic thriller, old-fashioned investigation… The series is not content to fit into a box. It is fascinating, dense – perhaps a little too much, the length of the episodes being the main fault – and staged with talent.
Nothing is left to chance and each character, stuck inside this hotel, reveals their complexity as the plot develops.
From A Murder at the End of the World, we can remember the following line: “The future of everything is in collaboration with artificial intelligence” – “the future of everything works hand in hand with artificial intelligence” in French.
A terrifying observation that the series highlights with real finesse which forces the viewer to delve into its questions. Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij create a necessary work that arrives at the right time. Unless it’s already too late…
Murder at the End of the World is available on Disney+.