Agatha Christie has been having something of a renaissance on Amazon (at least in the States), with new adaptations of some of the author’s works being reworked by writer Sarah Phelps and attracting talent like Bill Nighy, John Malkovich, and now Rufus Sewell in The Pale Horse. In some sense, it’s akin to what AMC has been up to with its much more expansive adaptations of John le Carré’s novels, having already delivered award-courting fare with The Little Drummer Girl.
Though the team behind these adaptations has had a good thing going, giving each the slightest tweak, so that the mystery is either solved differently or, in the case of the at-once-historical-and-contemporary themes of fascism in The ABC Murders, updating them to comment on the present day, The Pale Horse takes a surprisingly different approach. Though it is a period piece with themes that nevertheless resonate as strongly (if not stronger) today than when the series takes place, the story itself relies less on the tried-and-true methods of deduction, opting to create an atmosphere of uncertainty for all its characters, one that flirts with the supernatural, before snapping the audience back into reality.
Sewell stars as Mark Easterbrook, a wealthy antique dealer whose wife, Delphine (Georgina Campbell) took her own life, presumably after receiving some disconcerting news from a trio of psychics (believed to be witches) in a small village outside London. When the series begins, Mark has remarried and his new wife, Hermia (Kayla Scodelario), who dutifully plays along with the expectations of an upper-class housewife in 1960s London. The only problem is that Mark is a bit of a philandering bastard, and no sooner than the audience has been introduced to the supposed tragedy of his situation any sentiment toward the man is turned upside down when he is in the company of a showgirl who mysteriously dies in the middle of the night. Rather than alert the authorities and risk the shame and humiliation of being outed as a rake, Mark leaves the scene of the (maybe) crime, only to find his name’s been discovered on a list written by another woman whose death bears a striking resemblance to the showgirl he was with.
Phelps, who also delivered Amazon’s Dublin Murders on Starz earlier this year, has proven adept at moving the sometimes overwrought pieces around within these stories, making them not only palatable for television but also to make them feel contemporaneous with the world at large. Though The ABC Murders at times lacked subtlety, often to its benefit, that’s not the case with The Pale Horse, which not only makes a game of obscuring details of the crime but of reality itself. This approach is both a feature and a bug, as the story unfolds almost entirely from Mark’s perspective, which the audience is led to believe is that of an imperfect, but nevertheless still-grieving man.
Mark’s efforts to discover why he’s on a death list puts him on a collision course with Inspector Stanley Lejeune (Sean Pertwee) and Zachariah Osborne (Bertie Carvel), a twitchy weirdo so chock full of idiotic conspiracy theories he may as well be hosting Infowars. The result is an odd narrative concoction that toys with notions of gaslighting, the privilege of affluence, and how irrational fears can be stoked by some truly unlikely sources, often with disastrous results. Those results venture into some strange territory: a small village that’s home to the three “witches,” played by Kathy Kiera Clarke, Rita Tushingham, and Sheila Atim, and a weird, vaguely pagan-y festival that looks like it’s straight from the Wicker Man.
These devices seem to run counter to the more traditional whodunit of Christie’s work, and therefore make The Pale Horse something of an outlier in the author’s oeuvre. They also create a desire for greater exploration of the customs and traditions of the village, and how they fit into the larger mysteries and unexplained deaths Mark finds himself investigating — albeit for purely self-serving reasons. As such, the miniseries is the first of the more recent Christie adaptations that would have been better served by having another hour to mix it up with the witches and to push Mark deeper into the surreality the series only has time to hint at.
In the end, The Pale Horse works as an atmospheric departure from the likes of Hercule Poirot or dysfunctional families with literal and figurative blood on their hands. It’s not entirely successful in that endeavor, but it is engaging and at times disturbing, enough to hold most viewers’ attention for two hours.
The Pale Horse will stream on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, March 13.