Directors – (Episodes 1 & 5-6) Brit Marling & (Episodes 2-4 & 7) Zal Batmanglij, Teleplay – (Episode 1 & 4, 6-7) Zal Batmanglij & Brit Marling, (Episode 2) Zal Batmanglij, Brit Marling, Melanie Marnich & Rebecca Roanhorse, (Episode 3) Zal Batmanglij, Brit Marling & Melanie Marnich & (Episode 5) Brit Marling, Created by Zal Batmanglij & Brit Marling, Producer – Deb Dyer, Photography – (Episode 1&2) Charlotte Bruus Christensen, Music – Danny Bensi & Saunder Juuriaans, Visual Effects Supervisor – Aaron Raff, Visual Effects – Phosphene, Special Effects Supervisor – Mark Bero, Production Design – Alex DiGerlando. Production Company – Mysterium Valley/FXP.
Cast
Emma Corrin (Darby Hart), Brit Marling (Lee Andersen), Harris Dickinson (Bill Farrah), Clive Owen (Andy Ronson), Alice Braga (Sian Cruise), Javed Khan (Rohan Ravjit), Joan Chen (Lu Mei), Raul Esparza (David Alvarez), Edoardo Ballerini (Ray), Ryan J. Haddad (Oliver Marwan), Jermaine Fowler (Martin Mitchell), Pegah Ferydoni (Ziba), Louis Cancelmi (Todd Andrews), Kellan Tetlow (Zoomer Ronson), Brittan Seibert (Eva Andrews), Daniel Ronson (Tomas), Christopher Gurr (Marius), Neal Huff (Darby’s Dad)
Plot
Darcy Hart, author of the acclaimed true crime investigative book The Silver Doe, receives an invite from tech billionaire Andy Ronson to join a conference where he is bringing together people from various arts and technology fields to discuss the future. She is flown to a hi-tech hotel that Andy has built in remote Iceland. Andy is married to the legendary hacker Lee Andersen to whom Darcy dedicated her book. Darcy is surprised to also find that one of the guests is Bill Farrar, the guy she met from a true crime bulletin board and partnered with to track down a serial killer, which became the subject of her book. Bill says he wants to talk to her – only when she goes to his room that night, she sees him dying as she watches through the window. Afterwards, Andy dismisses Bill’s death as an overdose but Darcy is certain that it was a murder. She determines to use the technological resources around her, including the hotel’s A.I. Ray, to investigate. This causes Darcy to remember back to six years earlier when she, the daughter of a medical examiner, became determined to solve the murder of an unidentified woman where the sole identifying features were a pair of silver earrings on the skeleton. She and Bill connected on a cold case internet bulletin board and met up to follow the trail of the killer. During the course of their investigation, Bill became her first love. However, as Darcy investigates Bill’s death, there are murders of other guests at the hotel.
Brit Marling is one of the brightest and freshest talents to emerge in the last few years. Marling’s name appeared on the public radar in the early 2010s with the counter-Earth film Another Earth (2011) and Sound of My Voice (2011) in which she plays a woman who claims to come from the future, both of which she wrote and co-produced. Both films appeared at the same Sundance festival and went on to wide acclaim on the indie film circuit. Sound of My Voice was her first full-length collaboration with Zal Batmanglij, whom she had met while studying at Georgetown University. She and Batmanglij went on to make the film The East (2013) with he directing, both co-writing and she starring, where both joined an anarchist collective, squatting and living on scavenged food and then made a film about such a group targeting a multinational corporation. Marling appeared in assorted other roles including I Origins (2014) and the British tv series Babylon (2014). She and Zal Batmanglij then reteamed for the tv series The OA (2015-9), which developed a cult following, where Marling plays a missing woman who reappears and advocates a mystic ritual that opens the way to an alternate timeline, and followed that up with A Murder at the End of the World.
My initial expectations of A Murder at the End of the World was that it would be a murder mystery set among a modern IT environment. In fact, it wasn’t until the third episode in that I started to realise that I was going to have to review it as a work of science-fiction. It is a murder mystery that has been smartly conceived in terms of adapting to the modern 2020s hi-tech world where murder attempts include the killer managing to hack pacemakers or switching off the controls of a hi-tech environment suit leaving the wearer to suffocate inside, where Emma Corrin casually hacks door videocams, employs the in-house Artificial Intelligence as an investigatory aid and Clive Owen introduces the ingenious use of a LIDAR scan to track people’s movements in the building. Or of questions about how to erase one’s identity and avoid detection in a world of facial recognition scanners.
A Murder at the End of the World is not just a murder mystery, it is also a work that sits astride the 2020s technological revolutions. It is a show that both embraces the advent of Artificial Intelligence but is also deeply critical of it. It is a work where fears about climate change and oncoming social devastation are very much a given. And it features, at least at the outset, a cutting edge assemblage of hackers, tech innovators, environmentalists, robotics experts and artists that have been brought together in search of a new redefining breakthrough – at one point, Jermaine Fowler’s filmmaker shows scenes from a film he made in conjunction with the A.I. My only major quibble with plausibility in the show is seeing multiple scenes where characters, particularly Emma Corrin, venture into sub-zero conditions outside and we never see anybody’s breath steaming up.
Co-director, co-writer and star Brit Marling as Lee AndersenEmma Corrin as Darby Hart
There’s the striking intro to the mysterious assignation where Emma Corrin is contacted by an invitation from the A.I. (Edoardo Ballerini) who only appears on the screen of her phone yet manages to have a fully interactive conversation with her in her own apartment. The denouement of the mini-series and unveiling of the whodunnit is an extraordinary one that leaves you gasping – it is literally the least likely suspects who end up being the ones responsible, and is an ending that is deeply intertwined in the moral questions about trust of the technological revolution we are unleashing.
Your assumption is that we are in a slightly Near Future setting – the sophisticated development of A.I., talk about the building of smart cities, the use of advanced robotics to create entirely automated buildings and mention of Alice Braga as a woman who walked on The Moon in 2017. Elsewhere though, the dates state that this is the 2022 conference. So your only assumption can that we must be in some implied Alternate Timeline where technological advancement is slightly more advanced.
A Murder at the End of the World features a great cast, pointedly one that comes with a very international spread. Emma Corrin is a new face to me but gives a strong, intelligent and serious performance in the lead. Clive Owen, the most well known name present, delivers a performance that has both a considerable charisma and ambiguity as the series goes on. Brit Marling surprisingly takes a secondary role as Clive Owen’s wife, where you suspected that she wrote the role of Darcy for herself – perhaps at age 41, she no longer felt she could pull off the role of what is written as a 24 year-old hacker, Either that or she wanted to spend more of her time behind the camera, directing half the episodes, as well as co-writing and co-producing the show with Zal Batmanglij.
(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2023 list. Winner for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Clive Owen), Nominee for Best Actress (Emma Corrin) and Best Supporting Actress (Brit Marling) at this site’s Best of 2023 Awards).
