Seven Women and a Murder (2021) - Film Review
- Neyouno ケカ
- Apr 8
- 13 min read
A Whodunit so confusing it's basically a WTF-dunit???
Introduction
I have always been a huge fan of anything murder mystery related, films, books, shows, games you name it, and the Whodunit genre has always been a personal favourite, and today I may have come across the most absurd and confusing whodunit to date. While watching this film one thing stood out the most, and it was how odd it truly was. There are some truly good elements of the film, the music is impeccable as is the general sound design, the sets, or rather the one main set is quite well done, however it is rather underexplored which is a shame in a whodunit. Acting is quite good, while rather odd since the direction seems to be the main fault there, and that's about it for the positives, it's easy on the eyes, its shot well and it sounds neat. On the other hand the list of issues is quite substantial.
Premise
The premise of the whodunit is quite simple with a nice little twist. The eldest daughter Susanna returns back to her childhood home for Christmas as the majority of our main cast is introduced inside the mansion, pretty standard for your average whodunit. This is the part of the film where you are usually showcased the personality of the characters or rather the personality they would like to portray. This film's version of that is everyone being incredibly cold and not feeling like family in any way shape or form, which, usually, can be quite a good set up for these things, giving us reasons for discord inside of the family and potential for easily digestible murder suspects, here it's mostly just showcasing the cold demeanor everyone has towards each other, which for some characters makes sense and works, while for others is just quite odd. After we are introduced to our main cast of six women, the seventh comes later, we are introduced to our murder victim, the patriarch of the house hold Mr. Marcello, and the plot begins to unravel. They do leave some breadcrumbs here and there in this intro for the oddities of the circumstance, such as Maria, the newly hired maid, having a weird supposed first interaction with Susanna, and the youngest, Caterina, acting suspiciously odd when the murder itself happens. However, this intro is incredibly short to give us any sort of proper introduction to the cast that it leaves us feeling quite empty when the situation happens, which isn't helped with how, somewhat oddly and nonchalantly, everyone is behaving. This creates a really weird tone, where we aren't laughing at the supposed jokes like you would see in other comedy whodunits like Murder by Death (1976) and Clue (1985) .
Unraveling the Mystery
The core concept of a whodunit is to present us with a cast of characters, most usually with a motive for the murder while giving us, the audience, enough clues to piece together 'who done it'. This film is giving you some clues, that is for sure, however they reveal the culprit quite openly by omission. From the get go you are lead to believe that the widow Margherita has a not so great relationship with her husband. They don't sleep in the same bed, he often spends time with his first and true love, who he intends to add to his will, we later find out that she intends to leave the house while also having a lover of her own. Susanna is revealed to have lied about when she had arrived at the mansion, arriving early to tell her father about an unexpected pregnancy. Aunti Agostina, with her myriad of issues, is hopelessly in love with Marcello, who she is fighting over for with multiple women. Maria, the aforementioned housekeeper, is also sleeping with Marcello, while his long lost love the seventh woman Veronica is having an allegedly platonic relationship with him but a close one nonetheless. Then there is the old drunken grandma Rachele who mainly had a dispute about her bonds with Marcello. However, Caterina, seemingly had no quarrels with her father, had absolutely no issues and the film, somewhat, goes out of its way to exclude her from being a suspect or any suspicious activity, which makes her an incredibly clear choice for the culprit. This coupled with the obvious red herrings within the wife, the maid, the mistress, you are left with a clear solution to the whodunit mystery. While the actual ending is a bit of a spin on the whodunit formula, the path to it is falling into a trap of overshowing the audience your culprit by not shining enough light on them throughout the story, making it kind of obvious.
The Resolution
Amid all the weirdness that shall be discussed later, the film's ending is both good and bad. The good part about the ending is that it does a bit of a flip on the formula, there actually was no murder, but Marcello faked his death, with the help of his daughter Caterina, in order to ascertain who truly would miss him and who truly loves him in order to form a brand new will. On top of this twist the added one is that Marcello ends up committing suicide after it is revealed that he faked his death, most likely due to seeing how he surrounded himself with terrible women out to get him and use him, while also probably feeling guilty that every single one of his affairs, and there are a lot, were ousted. Another good thing about the film is that aside from the seven women, no man's face aside from the inspector at the end is shown, not the mysterious lover Giannutri and the victim Marcello. Which smartly shifts the focus from anyone else directly onto the 7 women creating a much tighter drama. On top of all of that i really thoroughly enjoyed how they framed the end credits, with each of the women accepting and even embracing their situation and deciding to stay in that house and continue with a fresh start. The editing here was quite nice, with each of the women getting their own important line and then a fade to their actress name. As well as another joke alluding to Susanna's baby being fathered by none other than Giannutri which was one of the rare moments i chuckled. The issue with the film is that the resolution comes by a bit abruptly with a lot of things poorly addressed. Maria figures out the ploy after seeing Marcello alive in his bedroom, and the mystery is revealed. Loads of character arcs are dropped, loads of gags unexplored fully and so on and so forth. The film really doesn't stuck the landing because what little set up is there is not being properly used.
Why is this film a WTF-dunit?
After describing the outlining plot of the film and showcasing what could appear as flaws of a mediocre film, you are probably left wondering why am i so dumbfounded by this film, what can it possibly do so oddly to have me write a review of a relatively poor and forgettable whodunit? Well, where do we even start. I suppose it would be smart to look at each of the characters and outline the baffling acting choices, direction choices, story choices or anything for that matter that the film does.
Take for instance Susanna, her character is impeccably bland, so much so that even the shoehorned plotline of her not being Marcello's biological daughter is dropped as quickly as it is picked up, the resolution comes and goes as quickly as the problem itself. She is incredibly suspicious of or weirded out by Maria when she arrives at the mansion, this could be explained by the fact that Maria knew that she had come the evening prior to talk to her father, but the level at which this is displayed is in no way proportional to everything else that happens. Her reaction to Marcello's death is rather tame, her reaction to finding out the pseudo affair between Marcello and Veronica is rather tame, and any weird or odd thing that she sees she kind of just overlooks. Her being showcased as a sort of point of view character at the start of the film is quickly dropped in favour of multiple characters and she gets sidelined to the point that her only real purpose in the film was to introduce us to the plot and to have one scene with her mother about who her real father was. Her entire character and subplot is mostly unnecessary and she doesn't even have any sort of proper motive for the murder so she is left to being a pointless character who does nothing and is a butt of a couple of jokes. On the other hand Maria's main issue is incredible inconsistency it feels like almost every scene she is in she acts differently. At first she is stern and focused on her job, but rather unwelcoming to Susanna, later she is indifferent to anything happening around her, up until the murder where she becomes incredibly passionate which quickly fades away. The scene where she begins serving all of the wonderful dishes of food she made is a bizarre contrast to her behaviour prior. That entire scene is quite baffling because we intercut the whole murdered Marcello plotline to have an incredible feast with all of the seven women, mostly to just have Margherita figure out that Maria has been having an affair with Marcello, another subplot which mostly goes nowhere. Another weird bit about this scene is that they decided to leave chocolate all around the mouths of these ladies for whatever reason. Later Maria goes back to her passionate self as her attempt to leave the house fails where she is again distraught. Then we get to the scene where she teaches Agostina to be more womanly and demand attention where she acts like a completely different character. She is now full of herself a complete master at work and frankly quite sassy, to the point it feels like she is flirting with Agostina. This then gets brought back to her being worried, back to her being witty and solving the mystery. Her character is actually really good and probably my favourite, but her main issue is just the inconsistency as she jumps from multiple different character types between scenes without a harsh enough distinction to where you can just say that it is a gag. On top of this all it really really frustrated me that the Ming statue she kept using for defense wasn't returned in a final gag where it would be broken or whatnot, terrible use of the gag. Veronica is another weird character who mostly has two notable states. The first state is being super cold super calculated in a way even jaded towards everyone. It is quite weird how someone who is actively having an emotional affair with Marcello is so commanding of presence from absolutely everyone, the daughters the hopeless auntie the wife, everyone. Her first scene places her in this weird lens where she is in command but incredibly reserved only for that to just fade later on as she has a weird but heartfelt moment with Margherita. Her character does serve a good bridge and explanation of a lot of the chaos happening in the film, so she is the least bit weird up until the scene with Margherita. Grandma Rachele is such a waste of potential. The actress is playing her really well, a weird drunken old lady who is clearly leading on to get pampered a bit too much, however her character is absolutely wasted. She boils down to an argument with Marcello about the bonds that she keeps hiding cause she is stingy, and to a gag where she is actually able to walk, making it a bit of a red herring because you believed that she could never commit the murder because of her disability but this changes things, an obvious fake misdirection. And another scene where she gets whacked over the head by a glass bottle at the hands of Margherita trying to hide Susanna's paternity, after which she is shoved in a closet and forgotten about until the very end of the film. She is mostly played for the jokes that she is stingy old and incredibly drunk, past that her character serves no purpose and she brings very little to the story and the overall structure of the film Caterina, due to her position in the story is left to hung out quite dry. Because the film refused to shed any suspicion on her she is left to have basically no character, she is a blank slate who early on has some rebellious moments with Agostina, who is just relegated to being a silent observer due to her committing the fraudulent murder. Her initial reaction to lock the door not let anyone touch anything and such adds the slight hint of suspicion to the audience but not to anyone in the house leaving all of us to simply forget about her existence for the majority of the film, until she reveals the truth. Her character was crucial to this storyline working well, because it required her to stand out enough to be noticed as a potential suspect but also be plausible enough to have done everything in order to create the ploy. We sadly didn't get either of these and she is basically the main suspect due to having no screen time and focus given her which is not what the film's story needed.
Agostina is probably the most consistent and well written character, however she is so incredibly shallow that there isn't much to praise or criticise. She is rather odd, feels quite ostracized due to the fact she wasn't able to find a partner, and is living for the past 10 years off of her sister and her husband, whom she is hopelessly in love with. The scene with Maria where she gets a make over is incredibly odd and somewhat unnecessary for her character because this inability to find a partner, other than the rejections by Marcello, isn't really explored properly. On top of that her being this interested in learning about seduction and getting a makeover hours after the supposed love of her life had been murdered in the same house she is in is quite odd and makes very little sense. Aside from that she had by far the funniest line in the film referencing that the only thing left in the house which is virgin would be her and Olive oil, which is simply hilarious.
And finally there is Margherita, by far the most complex character in the film and with that the center of the oddities. She is simply confusing. It is quite impossible to figure out where her heart and mind lies. One moment she is completely over her husband the next she is the most effected one, the next she again doesn't care and is focused on the money, after which she completely doesn't care about the money. She confronts Maria figuring out that she is having an affair, only to have one herself, and looking to move away. Followed by the breaking of a glass bottle on her mother's head, to which everyone reacts completely calmly by the way, after which she has a heartfelt discussion with her daughter. This then culminates in her discussion with Veronica and their subsequent fight, after which she asks Veronica to kiss her??? She is completely baffling, everything she does in this film has no rhyme or rhythm and perhaps if the film had set a better tone and given her a better supporting set of characters to work with she could somewhat carry the film. She is eccentric enough and all over the place enough to fit the comedy/whodunit genre, but the films tone is far too somber for this to happen, its far too serious and far too dramatic, for this type of character to thrive. I truly believe she is the wasted potential of this film, because i can definitely imagine her working in a more openly comedic whodunit.
Final notes
Few other things I would like the mention but didn't feel like would fit well anywhere else, would be the sort of technical aspect of the film. The props used and the scene selection is rather odd. The main "clues" that are used are seldom forgotten and seldom made look odd and insignificant. The main things that the film wants you to take note of, are the dogs not barking when someone familiar arrives, the phone line being cut, the car wire being cut, the front door being chained, the key being substituted, the medicine box being hidden and the bonds being stolen. None of which is particularly evident of who the killer is since at all times we aren't keeping track of who is where and what they are doing, to be more precise we are actually never doing that throughout the film. They are mostly used as random scenes sprinkled throughout the film to simply add the looming threat that the killer is still among us. When the reveal happens and we have that famous Sherlock Holmes or Poirot moment of everything being revealed it's mostly just going through a checklist of everything that was mentioned being accounted for, which leaves you mostly dissatisfied because, we know how you would cut the phone line, but when did you do it? How were you unaccounted for? And so on. Additionally the film begins with the front door of the mansion and the front gate, which establishes the mansions size and the weather, however, despite their being a snowstorm not a single character coming in and out of the house is covered in nearly any snow whatsoever. This coupled with the fact that these characters are incredibly quick, in a matter of minutes every single room, every single closet, every single backdoor, every single chest is thoroughly looked through when something is being searched. Maria magically goes through the entire house checking for killers in less than a minute. Catarina covers the entire house searching for medicine and combs every nook and cranny in a moment. Margherita goes to the car checks it comes back near instantly, which explains the lack of snow on her clothes. Many such cases, could work obviously, if played for a joke and for comedic value, however it's just done at face value which is rather odd. The music is quite good and the sound design greatly increases the dramatic flavour they were going for, however that tone does clash with the characters and the script. The sets are quite beautiful and, aside from the lack of exterior shots work really well. The film is simply odd, from the characters, to the actual mystery execution to the scenes being filmed. It is quite odd.
Conclusion
I simply do not know how to rate this film, because it isn't an utter failure, it does get to the finish line with a relatively interesting story, but the level of oddity with it's characters, the level of inconsistency in the world, the direction majority of the characters are written in is all over the place, it has to be a failure, but it has enough to elevate it above your average slop, because it does try to do something, what that something is is beyond me. I will humbly give it a 36/100, simply because 40 would have to be an acceptable film, and this one simply cannot reach that mark
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