Agatha Christie Screen Spotlight: ‘Crooked House’
Before finding massive international success as the creator of the TV series Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age, Julian Fellowes made his feature-film screenwriting debut with Robert Altman’s 2001 murder mystery Gosford Park. Fellowes won an Oscar for his Agatha Christie-influenced screenplay about the killing of a British aristocrat during a weekend hunting excursion at a country estate, and he belatedly took on an actual Christie adaptation with 2017’s Crooked House.
Although Crooked House went through several shifts in director, screenwriters and stars over the course of its multi-year development process, it’s still easy to see Fellowes’ effect on the final product from director Gilles Paquet-Brenner. Paquet-Brenner is credited as co-writer alongside Fellowes and Tim Rose Price, and he brings a somber tone to Christie’s story about the murder of a Greek-British business tycoon. Even so, there are plenty of lively light touches that are recognizable from Fellowes’ other work, including Glenn Close as the kind of salty matriarch played by Maggie Smith on Downton Abbey and Christine Baranski on The Gilded Age.
Close’s Lady Edith de Haviland is just one of the eccentric, shady characters that private investigator Charles Hayward (Max Irons) encounters at Three Gables, the sprawling estate owned by the late Aristide Leonides. Aristide was in his 80s, and his death by heart attack was initially ruled as natural causes, but further investigation has shown that he was poisoned. Two of his medications were swapped, leading him to receive a fatal injection of eserine rather than his intended insulin.
Charles is hired to investigate thanks to his previous connection to Aristide’s granddaughter Sophia (Stefanie Martini), with whom he engaged in a brief affair during his time in the diplomatic service in Cairo. That doesn’t mean that Sophia isn’t a suspect, though, and every member of the Leonides family seems highly suspicious. That also includes Aristide’s much younger second wife Brenda (Christina Hendricks), his adult failsons Roger (Christian McKay) and Philip (Julian Sands), and their respective wives Clemency (Amanda Abbington) and Magda (Gillian Anderson). Even Sophia’s sullen teenage brother Eustace (Preston Nyman) and her uncannily precocious 12-year-old sister Josephine (Honor Kneafsey) aren’t entirely above suspicion.
It’s a potentially unwieldy cast of characters, but one of Fellowes’ greatest strengths is balancing a large ensemble, and the filmmakers give each character in Crooked House a distinctive presence and personality. It helps to have so many talented actors involved, and Close and Anderson particularly relish their grande dame roles, with Anderson bringing an enjoyably hammy energy to Magda, a B-list actress with an inflated sense of her own talent and fame. Lady Edith, the sister of Aristide’s late first wife, is introduced wielding a shotgun that she claims is for exterminating moles, and she remains forceful and fearless even in the face of an investigation that threatens to tear her family apart.
“We’re a very odd family,” Sophia tells Charles, and Irons often just plays straight man to the offbeat characters around him. He’s even sometimes overshadowed as a detective by the mystery-obsessed Josephine, who calls him the Watson to her Sherlock and claims to know the identity of the murderer right away. Charles’ unobtrusiveness allows the film to focus on the potential mistakes and motives of the Leonides family members, until someone finally slips up.
Paquet-Brenner and his collaborators move the story about a decade forward from Christie’s 1947 novel, and they add some darker psychological underpinnings to the Leonides family members’ antipathy toward their controlling patriarch. Otherwise, Crooked House sticks closely to Christie’s plot, including a bold twist ending that’s among the nastiest Christie ever devised. In addition to Gosford Park, Crooked House was clearly an influence on Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, which likewise deals with the questionable death of a wealthy old man with a squabbling family.
While Fellowes has not returned to Christie or to murder mysteries, Crooked House shows that he could easily pick up those threads again, using the clout he’s built via his TV work to mount a lavish new take on Christie’s stories. The sardonic and twisty Crooked House proves that his formidable skills remain an asset to the genre.
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Josh Bell is a freelance writer and movie/TV critic based in Las Vegas. He’s the former film editor of Las Vegas Weekly and the former TV comedies guide for About.com. He has written about movies, TV, and pop culture for Vulture, IndieWire, CBR, Inverse, Crooked Marquee, and more. With comedian Jason Harris, he co-hosts the podcast Awesome Movie Year.