Agatha Christie's novel Towards Zero revived as racy miniseries
Agatha Christie is one of those writers whose books have launched a thousand adaptations. OK, if not a thousand, then at least enough to sustain decades of interest — in some cases, about a clear century.
The latest spin on Christie's work comes from overseas. British public broadcaster BBC has updated her 1944 novel Towards Zero for modern audiences, and the three-part series started streaming internationally April 16 on BritBox.
Set in 1936 England, it digs in as tennis star Nevile Strange (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), and his ex-wife Audrey (Ella Lily Hyland), decide to spend a summer together at Gull's Point, the seaside estate of Nevile's widowed aunt, Lady Tressilian (Anjelica Huston), who is bedridden and revising her will.
An innocent respite it is not. The trip is actually Nevile's honeymoon with his new wife, Kay (Mimi Keene), making for an uneasy — and scandalous — love triangle. One sequence on a staircase was enough to prompt the Daily Mail headline 'BBC viewers left stunned by 'filthy' X-rated scene.'
Elsewhere there are rich house guests behaving badly, in the vein of HBO's The White Lotus. F-bombs are detonated in a very un-Christie-like manner. Huston delivers withering, precisely pitched dialogue. And yes, to channel another famous English writer, there is murder most foul.
That murder happens much later than you'd expect, as it does in the novel. In fact, narrator Mr. Treves (Clarke Peters), says at the start, 'The murder is the end. The story begins long before, years before, when the murder is seeded — the point zero, if you will.'
Naturally, the events bring Inspector Leach (Matthew Rhys), into the mix. The detective is a fusion of two characters from the novel — Leach and his uncle, Superintendent Battle — who is traumatized from his time as a soldier in the First World War.
The miniseries, directed by Sam Yates, is visually sumptuous. The polish of period costumes and upper-class rituals contrast with the backdrop of the Devonshire coast. The performances are top tier. But the true allure of Towards Zero lies in its source material: Christie's 81-year-old novel.
Why does the author's work continue to draw audiences today? Christie's great-grandson, James Pritchard, offered his take in a BBC interview to promote the miniseries.
'Because the stories are genius, and genius plots and stories stand the test of time,' he said. 'The premise of them all is very modern — she basically writes about people, and people haven't changed in any serious way. So the preoccupations of people in the 1930s are not dissimilar to the preoccupations or motivations of people now.'
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