Bill Nighy’s patriarch Leo Argyll presides over Sunny Point, a Scottish baronial pile stuffed with Egyptian curios and five adopted children who all hate their dead mother. Eighteen months after golden-boy scapegoat Jack dies in custody, Luke Treadaway’s twitchy nuclear scientist Arthur Calgary surfaces claiming the lad was with him during the murder, forcing the family to reopen wounds that were barely scabs.
Sarah Phelps’s adaptation keeps the snowstorms and skulduggery of Christie’s 1958 novel but guts the moral neatness, swapping Calgary’s tidy confession for a queasier truth: the killer is Leo himself, aided by a bent copper who helped frame Jack to hide their own affair with the boy. Director Sandra Goldbacher shoots Inverkip like a Nordic noir, all slate skies and glassy lochs, while Stuart Earl’s strings saw away under chandeliers that drip icicles instead of crystal.
Production was delayed after original cast member Ed Westwick was replaced by Christian Cooke, necessitating costly reshoots that shunted the drama from Christmas 2017 to Easter 2018. The BBC’s third Christie festive “event” following And Then There Were None and The Witness for the Prosecution, it drew 8 million viewers and a Bafta nod for Phelps, who shrugged at purists: “If you want a pure adaptation, go and get someone else to do it.” Universal’s DVD landed a year later with no extras, leaving the bomb-shelter coda, Leo alive, imprisoned by his own offspring, as the series’ last icy sting.
Production Details
BBC One / 1 Season / 3 Episodes / 2018
Showrunner(s): Gaynor Holmes, Basi Akpabio, Sarah Phelps
Writer(s): Sarah Phelps
Producer(s): Roopesh Parekh
Cinematography: John Lee
Music: Stuart Earl
Main Cast
Bill Nighy as Leo Argyll
Anthony Boyle as Jack Argyll
Anna Chancellor as Rachel Argyll
Morven Christie as Kirsten Lindstrom
Crystal Clarke as Tina Argyll
Christian Cooke as Mickey Argyll
Alice Eve as Gwenda Vaughan
Matthew Goode as Philip Durrant
Ella Purnell as Hester Argyll
Eleanor Tomlinson as Mary Durrant
Luke Treadaway as Dr. Arthur Calgary
Brian McCardie as Bellamy Gould
