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Warning: spoilers for The ABC Murders (2018). Refers to murder, body horror?, domestic abuse, forced prostitution, child abuse, Brexit, racism, xenophobia, and major character death.
You may be aware that I'm a passionate fan of Agatha Christie's Poirot, starring David Suchet: it's my most-rewatched media since adulthood and I have a Poirot screencap sideblog on Tumblr,![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
maisouipoirot. (I've read most of the books, some repeatedly, without loving them as much.) In general I'm interested in the differences between source texts and adaptations, as opposed to automatically preferring one or the other, so I'm not a biased Suchet fan determined to hate any other interpretation. I was intrigued by the recent John Malkovich ABC Murders and encouraged by the early stills and clips.
I did enjoy it, particularly Malkovich's ( performance. ) The main thing I want to say about Malkovich Poirot, though, and the main thing that's interesting about The ABC Murders and the trend of recent Christie adaptations, is that it's an extra-transformative work, one that departs more deliberately and decidedly from the text than we've come to expect from our prestige-budget literary adaptations. And the fact that this is happening is pretty cool.
What I said on Twitter was that it was as if it had been dipped in a solid coating of Batman Begins-esque grimdark and then rolled in a fine layer of powdered Mike Leigh (ie gritty "kitchen sink realism": mundane, unpleasant, squalid and exhaustedly tragic. Leigh directed Meantime, the tv film in which Tim Roth and Gary Oldman first costarred, and for whose soundtrack I coined the phrase "the tinkly harpsichord of squalor").
Even better metaphor: remember that dark Disney princesses fanart trend? That's how I would describe Malkovich Poirot (but he's not the ones where the princess is just a monster or a serial killer, more the ones where the surroundings are a horror story and the princess is a bloodied and bedraggled but tough Survivor).
Well, actually, as I found out when I looked it up on IMDb after, ( I was more right than I knew. )
You may be aware that I'm a passionate fan of Agatha Christie's Poirot, starring David Suchet: it's my most-rewatched media since adulthood and I have a Poirot screencap sideblog on Tumblr,
I did enjoy it, particularly Malkovich's ( performance. ) The main thing I want to say about Malkovich Poirot, though, and the main thing that's interesting about The ABC Murders and the trend of recent Christie adaptations, is that it's an extra-transformative work, one that departs more deliberately and decidedly from the text than we've come to expect from our prestige-budget literary adaptations. And the fact that this is happening is pretty cool.
What I said on Twitter was that it was as if it had been dipped in a solid coating of Batman Begins-esque grimdark and then rolled in a fine layer of powdered Mike Leigh (ie gritty "kitchen sink realism": mundane, unpleasant, squalid and exhaustedly tragic. Leigh directed Meantime, the tv film in which Tim Roth and Gary Oldman first costarred, and for whose soundtrack I coined the phrase "the tinkly harpsichord of squalor").
Even better metaphor: remember that dark Disney princesses fanart trend? That's how I would describe Malkovich Poirot (but he's not the ones where the princess is just a monster or a serial killer, more the ones where the surroundings are a horror story and the princess is a bloodied and bedraggled but tough Survivor).
Well, actually, as I found out when I looked it up on IMDb after, ( I was more right than I knew. )
