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

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 Harry Potter films, is an old hand at family fare, but here his soft-pedalling instincts prove, well, murderous. The movie obsesses over getting the exact shade of Joyce's Victoria Sponge right rather than capturing an ounce of the book's nuance or irreverence. If you close your eyes, you can almost smell supermarket cake: uniform, sugar-dusted, utterly without character, nothing like the real thing.