Well, there are worse ways to keep your SAG-AFTRA health insurance.
Hallmark have been producing greeting cards since 1910 and branched out into television as long ago as 1951, when many countries didn't even have a television network. They've produced a very large number of TV movies in particular since then, now having two whole channels devoted to them. Including one for their mystery stuff.
They have a reputation for somewhat saccharine stuff, with more Christmas movies a year than you can shake a candy cane at. Along with cozy mysteries - nothing like True Detective round here, no thank you.
Now, I have a rather good memory for names and faces, even if I have problems sometimes associating the two together. In some cases, the connections are obvious.
So, I was looking through a list of their movies, just because, when a name I very much recognised alighted on my radar.
Elizabeth Henstridge.
For those of you haven't watched Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, she played Jemma Simmons, a biochemist and one half of "FitzSimmons", the science duo of the show that came with their pre-built shipping name.
She was also one of my favourite characters from the show.
Anyway, since the show ended in 2020, she's made a move into directing, although she hasn't done that much yet, but is still keeping up the acting... including in the piece that I am about to review. Indeed, this is her second Hallmark work, having previously done a Christmas movie for them.
One wonders if this particular script was something she went for out of genuine desire or desperation; a lot of former series leads have had real problems getting any work at all since the pandemic... and you have to earn a certain amount to retain your health insurance with SAG-AFTRA, the American TV and film actors' union.
(This movie came out mid-strike in 2023, so there is nothing on her Instagram promoting it as it was a "struck work".)
Anyway, I decided, for the sake of it, to give this movie a watch. Seeing a 5.6 rating on IMDB, I went into it not expecting Citizen Kane.
So, Dr Emilia Priestly (Henstridge) is a psychiatrist who does consultant work for the Metropolitan Police - it even says so on her lanyard[1] - talking to murder suspects to assess them. One day, she's speaking to an orange-jumpsuit-wearing one[2] when he threatens to get his mates to attack her.
This rather upsets her and she's feeling all stressed out, so her rich, posh and frankly annoying friend Baroness Jane "Janey" Alcott (Kezia Burrows, who mostly does videogame stuff, including the motion-capture work for Amanda Ripley in the superb Alien: Isolation) decides she needs a vacation.
To the immersive murder mystery resort of the title, located off the coast of some Latin American country. Indeed, we see Janey doing the old "gather the suspects and tell them all who committed the murder" thing... but getting it wrong. Again. I can sympathise, because I'm rarely good at this stuff myself.
After some reluctance, Emilia decides to go along - Janie's paying for it, because it costs $10,000 a weekend - to get away from solving real murders by solving a fictional one.
So, we go to this lovely island with a massive mansion that includes everything for a game of Clue[3] bar the billiards room.
With no murder yet. all the guests are gathered in a room where a butler with an eyepatch plays a record from the reclusive founder of the island, one John Murtagh with a cryptic message they have to solve to find the killer. There is no mobile reception and computers are a no-no, but there are a lot of books.
Emilia and Janey start on this... along with the wine. While doing a bit of tipsy sleuthing, find the apparently dead butler... who then comes to, having been chloroformed.
Then they discover a really most sincerely dead man with a fake beard... it's Murtagh. Someone has offed him for real. It's 19 minutes into the movie, in case you're wondering.
In any event, a Spanish-speaking inquisition turns up and we get down to the sleuthing. Well, mostly sleuthing. One of the detectives, Jason Trent (played by Charlie Weber), is coded as handsome. A rather chaste romance thing goes on between him and Emilia.
Emilia and Janey do a bit of their own investigation, but are eventually brought into the official investigation once they start doing better than the police.
So, at this point, rather than do a full blow-by-blow discussion of the plot, I'll go to bullet points:
- I twice noted a desire for the Baroness to become the second victim, although I had relented by the end. I still wouldn't stay at one of her castles though.
- The "immersive murder mystery" is nothing really new. It's been a staple of dinner theatre for quite a few years and even Belmond are doing it with their Pullman trains.
- In the early part of the movie, Emilia does have a rather contrived habit of turning up just in time to see or hear something relevant to the mystery.
- Emilia demonstrates a very good recall for facts, including quickly noting that all the suspects did leave the room at some point. A lot of this does involve knowing some rather obscure facts.
- Framing someone even if you know they're going to be acquitted at trial is still perverting the course of justice. Also, if Jemma Simmons murders someone, she's probably mind-controlled.
- Elizabeth Henstridge goes through several outfit changes, but few of them are exactly practical for sneaking around the Panama jungle. Or sneaking in general. White trousers and wedge heels?
- Of course, these mysteries are never satisfied with just one dead body.
- Detective Trent does have a tragic backstory. Trauma bonding for the win!
- Elizabeth Henstridge does rather good standing and watching, especially side-eye. She'd intimidate me.
- The chemistry between the two leads isn't anything like Henstridge had with Iain de Caestecker in Agents of SHIELD.
- The police here can't afford a digital fingerprint scanner as they have to do it the old fashioned way, with ink and paper.
- I did actually make a correct guess for part of the solution mid-movie, but failed to stick with it. However, this isn't a "fair" mystery as a key bit of information is learnt by the detectives before we know it.
- Gathering all the suspects is definitely "on brand".
- The solution is a somewhat novel one; you wouldn't have really been able to do this in 1975. Or even 2005.
- The ending is definitely setting up a sequel, while resolving the plot threads in a rather Hallmark way, telling not showing.
Conclusion
It's not brilliant, but it's not a bad movie. It's the sort of thing you would watch after a Sunday dinner, where you might be in a bit of a good coma and falling asleep won't be an issue.
Not everything has to be Citizen Kane. Clearly Hallmark were happy enough about it, because they made a sequel.
6/10
[1]That being a rarity in British productions, as those tend to use something like "Greater London Police" to avoid potential script clearance and other issues.
[2]We do not use these in British prisons.
[3]We call it Cluedo here, but clearly the scriptwriters failed to realise that or decided the Americans needed that version to understand.
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