Sterviceable but engrossing, this murder mystery is very old school by all means, a page-turner for many like Agatha Christie, indeed countless Christie imitators. He similarly used AI to write the script, lining up parameters such as “set in the 1930s”, “protagonist English fortune” and “an ethnically diverse cast of supporting characters/suspects”.
And so we have Mischa Barton playing Miranda Green, an art florist and naturally an avid reader of Christie’s; he receives a mysterious invitation and visits the secret tickets to the house of the great magnate Mr. Findlay on the island of textile. On the train, Miranda meets several other guests, all of whom are available to invite: rangy and rude Yank Walker (Chris Browning), mild-mannered Brit lawyer Lawrence Kane (Seamus Dever), Spanish minister Carmen Blanco (Bianca A Santos); posh doctor Phillip Armstrong (Aegidius Matthey) and soignée Chinese visitor Lu Wang (thanks to Lynn Kung). But when they all arrive at the great emergency room, the servants painfully inform their delayed host that they will pass the two truths and a lie during the cocktail hour. Of course Miranda turns out to be a crack, so much so that you’d think others would have objected more to the triumphant rudeness of each lie-cryer. Afterwards they turn their bodies, they are called inspectors, and secrets are revealed.
There’s absolutely nothing here to deter the horses or the grandmothers rising from the fire, except for a bit of icky romantic shenanigans in the last act that can’t be explained lest they spoil the story. It’s a shame the script doesn’t make something out of the fact that Miranda is a florist in some kind of botanical sense, like with these wacky acquisitions in hyper-niche markets that feature detectives with special interests in crochet, budgie training or sudoku. Instead, her preoccupation is only there to highlight her status as a working-class bourgeois woman whom everyone is going to underestimate. Flowers deserve better.