Netflix’s Intense Agatha Christie Mystery Takes Less Than 3 Hours to Binge

Giovana Gelhoren is a High-Trending Topics Writer at Collider, covering the most-talked-about stars, movies, and TV shows. Before joining Collider, she was a Digital News Writer at People Magazine and served as Associate Editor at SheKnows, where she honed her expertise in celebrity coverage and entertainment journalism.

A proud Latina from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Giovana graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in Journalism and International Studies. She has interviewed countless celebrities, including Anne Hathaway, Halle Berry, Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Brenda Song, and is known for her encyclopedic knowledge of film, TV, and pop culture.

In 2023, actress Mia McKenna-Bruce moved viewers in her breakout role in the British indie film How to Have Sex. Her performance, which earned her the coveted EE Rising Star Award at the BAFTAs, set her up to be one of Hollywood’s rising stars. So, of course, viewers were curious when she shifted from indie to Netflix in the platform’s miniseries adaptation, Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, which premiered this past winter.

The three-episode series, however, wasn’t exactly beloved after its release. Despite its star-studded cast and inspiration from Christie’s 1929 novel, the series received mixed reviews from critics and audiences alike. On Rotten Tomatoes, critics gave it 71%, and the public an even lower 50%. Nevertheless, the series is still an easy, three-hour binge, with a layered mystery that could have viewers hooked until the very end.

What Is ‘Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials’ About?

Set in England in 1925, Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials follows Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent (McKenna-Bruce), a young woman living with her mother, Lady Caterham (Helena Bonham Carter), in a large country house. After experiencing financial troubles, they decide to rent their home to the wealthy Sir Oswald Coote (Mark Lewis Jones) and his wife (Dorothy Atkinson), who decide to throw a lavish masquerade.

Toni Collette and Kit Harington are shooting a new Miss Marple and 20th
Century has several more Christies in development, so the drawing room is busier than it has been in
decades. Here is which of them you are, and the case for yours being the best.

Order, method, and a quiet confidence that you are the cleverest
person present. Poirot is a retired Belgian police officer who solves murders by sitting
still and thinking, and who is vain enough to make the reveal a performance every single
time.

• You need things to be in their right place and you are not remotely sorry about it.
• David Suchet played him for twenty four years and filmed every single Poirot story
  Christie wrote.
• Kenneth Branagh has made three as director and star, from Orient Express in 2017 to A
  Haunting in Venice.
• Your flaw is that the performance of being right can get in the way of simply being
  helpful.

People tell you things because they cannot imagine you being a
threat. Marple solves murders by comparing everybody to somebody she once knew in St Mary
Mead, which sounds like a joke until you notice it works every time, because human beings
are not as original as they think.

• You are the quietest person in the room and you leave knowing the most.
• Joan Hickson is still the definitive television Marple, and Christie herself wrote to
  her hoping she would one day play the part.
• Toni Collette and Kit Harington are making a new Marple film, announced this summer.
• Your risk is that people only work out how formidable you are once it is far too late.

You have far too many ideas and roughly a fifth of them are
excellent. Ariadne Oliver is a successful crime novelist who is sick of her famous foreign
detective and keeps saying so, which is Christie writing about Christie and getting away
with it completely.

• You think out loud, change your mind twice, and arrive somewhere nobody else would have
  found.
• She was Christie’s own stand-in, right down to being tired of the detective who made her
  rich.
• Tina Fey played her opposite Branagh in A Haunting in Venice and gave her the comic
  timing the part always wanted.
• Your flaw is that fourteen ideas take as long to sort through as they do to have.

You are steady, decent and the reason the difficult genius has
anybody at all. Hastings narrates the early Poirot novels, misses most of the clues, and is
the only character in the books that Poirot is unambiguously fond of, which tells you what
he is really for.

• You are the one who turns up, which sounds small and is not.
• Christie gave him the narrator role so readers would have somebody to be as lost as they
  were.
• Hugh Fraser played him across the ITV series and made him warm rather than slow, which
  earlier versions never managed.
• Your weakness is taking people at their word, which is lovely right up until it is not.

In attendance at the party are Gerry Wade (Corey Mylchreest), a friend of Bundle’s late brother and her potential suitor, and Jimmy Thesinger (Edward Bluemel), her closest friend. At the end of the party, two of Bundle and Gerry’s friends, Bill Eversleigh (Hughie O’Donnell) and Ronny Devereaux (Nabhaan Rizwan), play a prank on Gerry by hiding eight alarm clocks in his room.

The next day, however, the practical joke takes a turn when one of the guests turns up dead, with seven of the eight clocks on the mantle. Determined to find out what happened, Bundle begins a full-fledged investigation with the help of Jimmy, her supportive but distrustful mother, and the mysterious Superintendent Battle (Martin Freeman), a character who will be well known to Christie diehards. From the get-go, it’s clear that whoever pokes around the murder will pay the price, but Bundle will stop at nothing to find answers.

‘Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials’ Is Worth Watching for Its Short Runtime Alone

• Image via Netflix

• Image via Netflix

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Image via Netflix

Out of all of Agatha Christie’s novels, Seven Dials is one of her least celebrated and most criticized works, making the adaptation divisive from its very inception. And, despite the A-listers like Bonham Carter and Freeman, the series wasn’t enough to fully entice viewers, with David Caballero summarizing it simply as “dull” in his review for Collider. “Too slow to be riveting and too needlessly drawn out, it’s a run-of-the-mill adaptation of one of Christie’s most run-of-the-mill novels,” he stated. “And the strongest proof that not every work from the renowned author warrants a fresh take.”

Despite the mixed reception, however, Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials is merely three episodes long, making it an easy binge for any Netflix subscriber. After all, while detective shows are everywhere on Netflix, Harlan Coben mysteries take a full-length season, while movies like Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery require a longer sitting no matter what. Instead, however, Seven Dials thrives in being a quick, snappy mystery that draws viewers into its 1920s world and doesn’t wait long for revelations.

“This tidy journey of less than three hours is lovely period-movie fun,” wrote one review on Rotten Tomatoes. So, while it’s certainly not the best murder-mystery on the platform, it’s an easy mystery to watch through to the end while still feeling satisfied.

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials