Ms. Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries: "Reel Murder" (Every Cloud Productions, Seven Productions, Screen Australia, Film Victoria, All3 Media, GPB, WGBH, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, March 16) I watched a couple of TV items, an episode of Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries called “Reel Murder” and a 1967 French neo-noir movie called Le Samouraï. The Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries episode (the show’s awkward title is explained by the fact that it’s set in the 1960’s and is a follow-up to a previous show, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, set in the 1920’s and featuring a plucky female detective who’s either the mother or the aunt of the lead in this one) has the highest rating of any show in the series (though there were only 12 shows total over a run from 2019 to 2021). But I found it pretty dull going; it’s about a fishing party led by Peregrine Fisher (Geraldine Hakewill) and featuring some of her friends, including Samuel Birnside (Toby Truslove), who hooks a corpse accidentally while casting his line. The corpse turns out to be Morris Dunnet (Wayne Cartwright), a spousal abuser and all-around nasty piece of work. His wife disappeared five years before and he was indicted for murdering her, but he was acquitted largely because he’d done such a good job disposing of her body it was never found.

Among the suspects are middle-aged woman Enid Holdstock (Jennifer Vuletic), who used to clean house for the Dunnets and therefore got to watch first-hand as Morris regularly assaulted her; Abraham Sifo (Christopher Kirby), a minister whose church included the Dunnets as parishoners and thereby also got a ringside seat at the horrible way he treated her; Frank Quinn (Matthew MacFarlane), Morris’s former brother-in-law, who’s also never forgiven Morris for the way he treated Morris’s wife/Frank’s sister; and another oyster in the stew, Suzie Lew (Alessandra Merlo), a family friend. Eventually writer Felicity Packard decided [spoiler alert!] to rip off the notorious gimmick first used (I think) by Agatha Christie in Murder in the Calais Coach, later filmed twice as Murder on the Orient Express: all four prime suspects worked together to off the bastard, though the official cop on the case, Peregrine’s sort-of boyfriend Detective James Steed (Joel Jackson), is told by his superiors to accept Enid’s confession of sole guilt. She reasons she’s the oldest of the four and her heart condition makes it unlikely that she’ll live much longer anyway, so she agrees to assume legal guilt to protect the well-meaning other three. This plot gimmick is hard enough to accept as it is – “Only a half-wit could guess it,” said Raymond Chandler about Christie’s novel – and it only works if the murder victim is himself a despicable person: a child molester in Christie’s novel (though for some reason that plot point was eliminated in the first film, and I haven’t seen the second) or a domestic violence perpetrator here.