The thriller genre is the streaming world's favourite comfort food, but there really aren't many classical whodunits around anymore. Everything nowadays is based more around suspense, shocking twists, police procedure, or rich people being terrible to each other. However, as a longtime fan of good old-fashioned murder mysteries, I was very much looking forward to "Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue", an unexpectedly old-fashioned take on Agatha Christie's classic "And Then There Were None".
Another reason why I was watering at the mouth about this show is that it's written by Anthony Horowitz. It may be deeply unserious of me, but Horowitz is my favourite living novelist. His genre-redifying, metatextual whodunits always find audaciously novel ways of reusing old formulas with clever yet unobtrusive post-modernist twists. Horowitz is also a brilliant screenwriter, as anyone who's ever seen "Foyle's War" can attest. Here, the Christie connection deepens as Horowitz adapted several of her works for the long-running "Poirot" series. Most importantly for me, he wrote the episode "Yellow Iris", in which he reinvented Christie's very short story as a superbly puzzling, non-linear meta-mystery with a dazzling climax. It remains the only time any screenwriter has ever actually improved on one of Christie's plots.
Now, having seen "Nine Bodies", I do have to concede that it's not one of Horowitz's finest works. It is a fairly straightforward whodunit slasher without any of the writer's trademark boldness or inventiveness. Instead, what I found so delightful about the series was precisely its old-fashioned approach. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it's not loaded with knowing film references or sarcastic winks to the audience. Most enjoyably, it also lacks the irony which is the plague of most modern genre pieces. Here, at last, is a slasher tale told by someone who doesn't worship at the feet of "Scream".
The premise is very much as advertised: nine people survive a plane crash, find themselves stranded in the Mexican jungle, and are picked off one by one by a mysterious killer. The cast of characters is made up entirely of stereotypes: the tough guy, the selfish guy, the mousy girl, the stuffy doctor, the MAGA-loving Americans, etc., etc. After all, it's the way the genre works. I enjoyed that Horowitz didn't feel the need to give us lengthy flashbacks or expositional monologues about the characters' backstories. Let's just focus on the mystery at hand.
The quality of the performances varies, but the protagonists who emerge very quickly are all quite good. Eric McCormack is especially fun to watch as the weasely doctor. Meanwhile, Lydia Wilson and David Ajala are quite likeable and charismatic as this show's versions of Kate and Jack from "Lost". My one constant issue with the performances is the presence of some truly awful American accents from otherwise good British actors. Siobhan McSweeney is probably the biggest offender with her over-the-top Southern draaaaaawl, but Adam Long is no better with his stiff, vaguely trans-Atlantic lilt.
What the show really lacks is strong, stylish direction. This is usually what separates great thrillers from mindless potboilers. Unfortunately, "Nine Bodies" falls squarely in the latter category. The show is directed by two people, Brian O'Malley and Viviane Andereggen, each handling three episodes. While Andereggen clearly does the better job, neither director really infuses the show with any atmosphere or visual flair. The cinematography is disappointingly bland throughout, and the framing frequently makes the show look like a workaday police procedural instead of the moody slasher it should have been.
Back to the script. Horowitz has concocted a deliciously enjoyable variation on "And Then There Were None". I enjoyed trying to outguess the characters, even though I wish there were more clues to the solution. In the end, all the plot threads really do come together in a satisfying manner. Of course, it's all utter hokum, but that's part of the genre's fun. Even with the best Christie or Dickson Carr novels, you have to play by their logic. The plotting's one gaping flaw is the survival of one character (I won't say which) who really has no business being alive at the end. That, I'll admit, made me groan. Also, I knew that Horowitz simply won't be able to resist reusing one of Christie's finest twists, so I did figure out who the killer was before the finale, but that's also par for the course.
Otherwise, I had a lot of fun with "Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue". It's the kind of old-fashioned good fun I miss in this jaded, self-important age of event television. Forgive me, but sometimes I don't really want my thriller to be a dark journey into the drug-addled underworld of contemporary America or a scathing indictment of the capitalist system. There's room for your "Long Bright Rivers" and "Sirens", for sure, but I'm hungry for some convoluted, preposterous, but wildly engaging and cleverly constructed puzzles.
