The first thing to notice about the 2015 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is that it is a horror story. Not a mystery, exactly, and not a whodunnit. There’s no Detective Poirot or Miss Marple to solve the crime and save the day. No one is coming to save anyone, and what may be more frightening is the fact that no one deserves to be saved. The island may be just off the English coast, but it feels like its own world, one separate from any traditional forms of justice. If there is a comparison to another work of literature, it’s to Lord of the Flies.
The reason this story works as horror is because it exists in a moral world, though not the one you usually find in detective fiction. People pay for their sins here, but there is no catharsis or sense of rightness in the punishment. If the characters are guilty, so are we: so is everyone. This is less a story of justice in the human sense than one of chickens coming home to roost. Crimes have their inevitable conclusion in retribution, one way or another, and every bill eventually comes due. Things are fair, but they aren’t just. They’re not right. No one is made whole, and nothing is restored.
Importantly, these aren’t just individuals paying for their individual sins - each character is a stand in for some British institution. The sins each one pays for are that institutions’ sins. Every character is guilty, most of all, of fully playing their part as a representative of that system. Everything, high and low, is accounted for: the army, medicine, the church, the aristocracy, the servant class, the police, the law, the empire, education. Once you notice that, it becomes impossible to ignore that this story takes place as the memory of one world war is starting to fade into history and another stares everyone in the face. In And Then There Were None, England is on trial for all of its crimes, great and small.
The crime, the one each character is guilty of, is a kind of selfish carelessness, and the way they each stand in for great British institution elevates this carelessness to a horrific level, invoking an almost existential dread. Horror is created when the boundaries we depend on to make sense of the world blur or break down. Every boundary and guardrail breaks here. We depend on medical professionals, on teachers, on the church and the law to care for us and guide us. We depend on the idea of the empire and the army and the police to justify our own way of life. We depend on aristocrats to embody our ideas of meritocracy - because surely the people at the top must be the best, or else how can we justify their abundance in the face of so much want? We depend on servants to care for us lovingly and selflessly, or else how could we endure such intimacy bought so cheaply?
What And Then There Were None forces us to face is the violence inherent in all of those institutions, and in our relationships with them. We are forced to accept that doctors, generals and judges are just as venal and stupid and weak as anyone else, and just as prone to disastrous mistakes with worse consequences. The church, seen here as a bitter, self-righteous middle-aged woman, expects an impossible perfection in exchange for a help given bitterly. The police and the soldiers of the empire are violent thugs, who enact violence not in defense of ideals or even property but out of pure malice. Aristocrats are spoiled, lazy and stupid. The teachers who care for our children and the servants who care for the old are only people working jobs; they don’t love their charges and never did. The only reaction possible after such revelations is despair, or else the judge’s wry, cynical rage which spares no one, not even himself.
The cast of this adaptation is flawless, to a person. I don’t know that I can even pick an MVP - they are all so good, and they all manage to be ridiculous and tragic in turns. Charles Dance, Toby Stephens, Sam Neil, Miranda Richardson, Anna Maxwell Martin - they’re all great. Maeve Dermody as Vera is perfect; the sly way she makes Vera’s villainy creep up on you is incredible. She manages to embody the sick joke of the novel, where what you think is Vera’s guilt at an accident is actually anger that her plan didn’t work. It’s incredible stuff.
This is, to my mind, the definitive adaptation of the novel. There are changes, but I don’t mind any of them. The darkness and sickness is brought to the fore, and what was an interesting puzzle with interesting implications becomes a terrifying tragedy. It rocks.