Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials Review: Chris Chibnall Brings Contemporary Depth

This Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials review contains no spoilers.

When you hear the name Agatha Christie, your mind tends to go in one of two directions: Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple. The author’s most famous fictional sleuths, these two characters solve murders in a combined 45 novels and over 70 short stories, have inspired long-running, culturally beloved television programs, and crossed over into the cultural zeitgeist in ways that few detectives who aren’t named Sherlock Holmes can match.

But the author technically created somewhere around a dozen investigative figures across her vast collection of work, and one of the best of them — Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent — rarely gets the recognition she deserves. Here’s hoping that’s about to change with the arrival of Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, a glitzy three-part Netflix adaptation of The Seven Dials Mystery that’s clearly hoping to introduce the Queen of Crime to an entirely new generation of viewers. 

No one who’s read Seven Dials — or really any of Christie’s Superintendent Battle books, of which this is one — is likely to expect an on-the-nose retelling of the original text. (Battle mysteries are most often adapted to excise the detective from his own stories entirely, if that’s any hint at how generally unremarkable the character is.) And while series creator Chris Chibnall — of Broadchurch and Doctor Who fame! –- does make some fairly significant changes to the source material, they’re almost always in the service of adding more emotional depth and context to a story that often lacks either. (We can forgive him, Christie purists, is what I’m saying.) Featuring a spunky young heroine, a stellar supporting cast, and a story that’s grounded in both genuine emotion and surprisingly contemporary politics, Seven Dials is not just peak cozy winter entertainment; it’s a hopeful sign that Netflix might actually manage to launch a successful British mystery franchise of its very own. 

Though The Seven Dials Mystery is technically the second of Christie’s books to feature Lady Eileen (Mia McKenna-Bruce), the series has, for all intents and purposes, decided to reimagine the whole affair as an origin story. It’s a smart choice, given that its predecessor, The Secret of Chimneys, is a lot more politically minded and less character-focused. Events begin at the Caterham family’s stately country pile, where a party is in full swing.

Lady Caterham (Helena Bonham Carter), poorer than she likes to let on, has rented out the estate to a self-made industrial magnate (Mark Lewis Jones) seeking to improve his social status, and the event is full of members of the aristocracy and the U.K. government. But things go horribly wrong after a group of Foreign Office employees decides to play a prank on a coworker, setting eight alarm clocks in his room all set to go off at once. This is because their colleague, Gerry Ward (Corey Mylchreest), is infamous for sleeping late, and this is apparently what passes for a good time amongst the well-off young men of post-war Britain. The joke’s on all of them, though, when Ward turns up dead the next day. 

Furious at not being taken seriously when she questions the circumstances of Gerry’s death, Bundle vows to get to the truth. She and Gerry were quite close: he served alongside her late brother in France, was a friend to both her and Lady Caterham following his death, and seemed to be on the verge of proposing. Seven Dials smartly spends a bit of time at the beginning of the series deepening and fleshing out this relationship in a way that the novel does not, giving the duo a bittersweet, doomed lovers vibe that goes a long way toward establishing why Bundle simply can’t let go of this particular mystery. (McKenna-Bruce and Mylchreest have outstanding chemistry; someone needs to cast them together in a rom-com yesterday.) 

As the coincidences and general oddities around Gerry’s death begin to stack up — the seven clocks left on a mantlepiece in his room, an unfinished letter, a seedy nightclub, friends who definitely know more than they’re telling, and another dead body — Bundle eventually finds herself in the orbit of Superintendent Battle (Martin Freeman), who seems to share many of her misgivings about the case. A dogged if generally unremarkable investigator, Battle immediately warns the young woman off the investigation, but seems largely unsurprised when she doesn’t listen. The two make an appealingly oddball detective duo, and both are eventually drawn to the notorious London neighborhood of the series’ title, where they may or may not find answers. 

Seven Dials’s central mystery is, admittedly, not one of Christie’s best, involving everything from a country house murder to elaborate international espionage and a secret cabal of weirdos who (at least in this adaptation) meet wearing face masks shaped like clocks. To Chibnall’s credit, there are more breadcrumbs offered here than in the original text about whodunnit — it’s decent odds you’ll figure out the culprit well before the series tells you — and the entire story is a much more streamlined and easy to follow affair.

It’s also a surprisingly contemporary adaptation, reframed in a way that speaks to all-too-timely issues of empire, expansion, and the long-tail impact of trauma, even blatantly paying homage to Christie herself by setting its climactic final confrontation in the aisles of a moving train. These are all characters who have been irreparably shaped by the events of war and conquest, from displaced Cameroonian scientist Dr Cyril Matip (Nyasha Hatendi) to Gerry’s co-workers from the Foreign Office, who all clearly still live with the ghosts of what happened to them abroad.

But what makes this series worth watching is its star. McKenna-Bruce is luminous throughout, a feisty, thoroughly likable presence with clever one-liners and an admirably determined spirit. It’s difficult not to wonder why Christie only wrote two novels that feature this particular Bright Young Thing, if only because it’s so easy to imagine her starring in all sorts of adventures in her own right. (I suspect Netflix would like to let her do that, for what it’s worth.) Freeman plays Battle as a capable straight man to Lady Eileen’s fizzy effervesence, even if it is more than a bit strange to see him in a lead detective role after so many years watching him play the sidekick in the BBC’s contemporary take on Sherlock. Elsewhere, Bonham-Carter is doing a peak Grey Gardens impersonation as a gender-swapped Lady (formerly Lord) Caterham, and the suddenly everywhere It Guy Edward Bluemel is almost irritatingly charming as playboy Jimmy Thesiger. 

It’s true, Netflix’s Seven Dials is not the most technically accurate translation of Christie’s work to the screen. But it gets the spirit of the affair, exactly right, and that’s surely got to count for something.

All three episodes of Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials are available to stream on Netflix now.