Murder, but half-baked

It's just that it wasn't on screen. I consumed that sponge-cake of a novel in the form of an audiobook narrated by the sublime Lesley Manville.

- RAJA SEN

It's just that it wasn't on screen. I consumed that sponge-cake of a novel in the form of an audiobook narrated by the sublime Lesley Manville. The radiant actress, who was so astonishing alongside Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread, breathed such spark and subtlety into Richard Osman's elderly sleuths that the book leapt to life. (Osman himself, with his affable baritone, handled the subsequent sequels, but Manville conjured a magic beyond the reach of mere authorial affection.)

It's masterful how Manville channelled the characters; the actress perfectly finding the balance between Elizabeth's pointy candour and Joyce's blithe wit. Think of lines like "Some people love power because it turns them on. I love power because it puts an end to stupidity." Read out in Manville's crisp timbre, every syllable rings with the clarity of freshly polished spectacles. In Osman's own warm delivery, it drifts past pleasantly and less incisively. Still, his books are bright and fun, compulsively readable.

Netflix's new film adaptation, on the other hand, with the glossy clank of studio machinery, stamps out all that is fresh and fizzing in the source material, creating a product so inoffensive it is nearly invisible. Christopher Columbus, director of Home Alone and the first two