Thursday Murder Club (2025) - Film Review

Neyouno ケカ
Apr 29
7 min read

A Lovely Murder Mystery which leaves you wanting more.

Introduction

As a big fan of Murder Mysteries, Chris Columbus and almost every single main actor in this film i was naturally drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Upon watching the film, not only was I right in my assumption that i would enjoy it, but i am left with a pressing feeling that I need more of this series. To my luck I've found out that the film was based on a book series and if we are lucky, we'll be getting the rest of the novels adapted into lovely whodunits.

Premise

The story is built around the titular Thursday Murder Club (TMC) which consists of a group of retirees living in a pseudo retirement complex. The main members of the club are Penny, a retired police officer who is out of commission for the majority of the film, Elizabeth, a woman of many talents, to say the least, and our protagonist, Ron a former union organizer, Ibrahim a retired therapist specialized in PTSD, and our "fish out of water" exposition character Joyce, who is a retired nurse. The film starts off on another usual Thursday with the club solving a cold case, when they find themselves in need of a medical expert in order to further their investigation. That's where Joyce comes in, who is mainly here to be the lovable granny with some personal issues with her own daughter who is going to help clue the audience into the TMC and its members. While this is happening there's an ongoing issue with the owners of the Coopers Chase, the aforementioned retirement village they all reside in. One of the owners Ian Ventham has found himself in marital troubles and is in need of selling the property in order to make up the money, as the story progresses the other owner, who is vehemently against the selling of the property, Tony Curran is found dead, and the club finally has a real and active case they need to pursue.

The Mystery

Unlike with my previous whodunit i would like to keep the solutions to the mystery, well a mystery. The film intertwines multiple mysteries quite well, and resolves them all even better. The thing i liked in particular was how well it did the obvious thing, which is intertwine the original cold murder to the current day storyline, while it was expected it was done masterfully, much like the rest of the story. The really impressive part is that they are constantly giving us, the audience every single detail that the characters are getting, a mistake that modern whodunits like Knives Out often make. And not only do they give us little details that help solve the mystery, these details are then incorporated into the story, the characters are acting like real human beings and every detail that is of relevance is used in the story. At times this is a tad on the nose and obvious, mostly because it is a bit cliched, but it genuinely works and makes the film quite enjoyable.

It is rather hard to discuss this film's mystery without exposing each subsequent mystery, each murder is tied in to the next, and each piece of the puzzle continues upon the previous one. The cold murder connects to the ending, the offbeat line about a divorce ends up having deeper implications about characters in the film, and the ending requires each and every one of the previous pieces to properly fall into place. The film does a masterful job at this and leaves you with that signature "AH-HA" moment that a proper whodunit should.

The Characters

Without spoiling too much i would love to give the kudos to the amazing, and obviously, brilliant cast of the film and how well they portray their characters, but i would be remiss not to mention the fact that not all of the characters are fully and equally explored. For Example Joyce is mostly used to be a sort of Wotson-esque character, an audience self insert into the world of the TMC, this is obviously helpful and done quite well, and she does indeed have a couple of her own character moments with her daughter, but they are so incredibly scarce in comparison to other characters that she at times ends up being an afterthought and a comedic relief with her cakes.

Ron on the other hand is just explored enough to feel like a fully fleshed out character, however he is just neutral enough to not be deep enough. Especially his relationship with his son is not properly explored. He is quite interesting and Pierce Brosnan plays him wonderfully as this suave and charming retiree, but he is just not deep enough to be fully interesting. The moment where his character falls completely flat in my eyes is when his son is taken into custody and his dear friend is hiding information from him, but rather than being emotional he is quite relaxed, this is probably due to the fact that the entire planning phase and discussion phase of the son's rescue was skipped, which leaves us wanting more. The resolution of the character is mostly done through visuals, with him accepting his son and his new career, which is done quite well, it reduces his ability to be a sort of emotional core of the group but it works nonetheless. Another character that feels sort of wasted Was Ibrahim. His role in the TMC is to be the sort of brains of the operation, he is also the most posh member of the group, but this leaves him to have three relevant scenes, the eulogy at the end, the calculation of the time it would take to arrive at a certain place, and the use of his PTSD psychologist experience as his main moments. Past that the character is really undercooked, this, much like with Ron, could be something further explored in the future installments depending on how the books handled these characters. Finally, we have Elizabeth, the core and soul of both the story and the TMC. Not only does she have a deep personal investment in all of the cases happening, she is also the most adept at criminal investigation, something we continuously get hints of throughout the film. Hellen Mirren absolutely carries the film and her interactions with every single character is the core of the story. A thing that is quite wonderful about the film is that it doesn't make Elizabeth all knowing, despite having a couple of Marry-Sue Moments, she makes mistakes, and her main role is in giving us the audience a means to gather evidence and further along the investigation. Hell, she isn't even the first person in the story to completely figure out the solution to every single mystery. At one point though they did leave her to completely miss a resolution that should've been incredibly obvious, however this could be explained by her emotional connection to that particular case, though the dialogue in the scene wasn't written well enough to support this. Elizabeth's character would work incredibly well as a mainstay in detective fiction going forward, and I simply cannot wait to see her in more films or read about her in the books. There are other auxiliary characters, like the villains of the story, as well as the lady cop and main police investigator, however their characters are mostly used as tools through which Elizabeth gathers the information she needs and as pseudo obstacles and comedic relief characters.

Final notes

The mystery is done expertly and the characters are played incredibly well. The main issues I would have with the film would be the lack of deeper exploration of the members of the TMC other than Elizabeth, as added depth would bring a lot more heart and soul to the story, either by giving each of the members are more dedicated role, a sort of classic heist movie feel, or by giving them enough character and agency on their own to feel more fleshed out. Another issue I've noticed with murder mysteries, especially these 'cottage mysteries' is that they truly benefit from the worse quality those serialized films in the late 80s and 90s had. It feels a lot less cozy and a lot more overproduced, which hurts the immersion a little bit, the film truly feels too HD for what it is going for. This is something that the Knives Out films also suffer from, however they have expanded the scope to better meet this visual feel. This leaves the film to feel in this weird limbo of modernism and archaism in the story, with the opposing sides being a brash young businessman and a group of pensioners, so the visual style of the film has a lot of hard clashes which ends up giving a weird feeling. The story at the core, however, is quite brilliant and works on absolutely every level, it does need a bit more depth, and would either benefit from being a TV Show over a film or even just a longer runtime, the film does a really really good job at conveying its story.

Conclusion

I absolutely adore this film and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the genre. Much like with my Read or Not 2 Review I would like to give this film two grades, one for personal enjoyment as the experience was quite lovely and I am a biased fan of the genre, and a more critical one. I absolutely loved the film and would highly recommend it to any fan of the genre, it's a clear 10 with slight character blemishes so I would give it a score of 98/100, meanwhile the issues with the character depth, the sadly short run time for the story, and the visual clash, I would still give it a solid 8 going onto a 9, an 84/100 score. This is a film that, not only, would I love to recommend, but I would love to see sequels a dozen.