Crooked House (2017)

Crooked House arrives as a 2017 adaptation of Agatha Christie's 1949 novel, a period whodunit set in the mid-1950s among an aristocratic English family. The investigator Charles Hayward is summoned by a former flame to determine whether her wealthy Greek-born grandfather was murdered. The ensemble is uniformly white, uniformly British, and occupied entirely with money. Nothing in the film's casting, its themes, or its concerns suggests any awareness of a cultural conversation that began after the novel was published. It is a drawing room, and the door has been shut for seventy years.

The women here are forceful. Josephine, twelve years old and privy to everyone's business. Edith with her shotgun and her moles. Clemency, the plant biologist fluent in poisons. Magda, the fading actress. These are Christie's customary schemers, deployed as suspects and red herrings, not as arguments. The plot concerns an enormous fortune and a family clawing over it, yet the film treats the inheritance as furniture. It observes the greed without indicting it. An attack on wealth would require a position, and the film declines to hold one. Nobody lectures. Nobody sermonizes. The murders are solved, the guilty drive into a quarry, and the audience is left with the modest pleasure of a puzzle assembled correctly.

There is no environmental messaging, no engagement with race beyond a biographical footnote about the patriarch's birthplace, no romantic subtext beyond the conventional, no attention to the body as a political subject, and no attempt to reframe the child's cold cleverness through a modern clinical lens. The film offers craft instead: Glenn Close, Gillian Anderson, Terence Stamp, and Christina Hendricks doing competent work in handsome rooms. It knows what it is and apologizes for nothing. Such restraint is nearly extinct. We note it and move on.