‘Daggers in the back: back from the dead’: the temptation to kill in the MAGA universe | Cinema: premieres and reviews

No matter how many dead there were around, Agatha Christie’s novels were always a game, and not exactly macabre. In fact, over time, their stories became more or less explicit cultural and leisure recreations. Go to your play in London The mousetrap —the piece that, since 1952, has had the longest survival on the world’s billboards— is more of a self-conscious pastime than the discovery of a criminal entanglement. Four years earlier, in 1948, the Cluedo, a fabulous board game that, generation after generation, showed the world the mental recreation of wanting to discover the identity of a murderer around a handful of excited characters. And the films that adapted his formula whodunit —the English term that defines the subgenre, with its contraction in a single word of the phrase “who did it”— became increasingly consistent with that purely playful character. Of course, until reaching the parody.

Rian Johnson, a playful director if ever there was one, has been the latest to exploit the characteristics of composition, structure and roles of the great British lady of detective intrigue with a saga of films that are increasingly naughty and, at the same time, increasingly distant from reality: Daggers in the back. If in Christie’s texts, despite their mannerism and sophistication, a certain amount of social and character credibility continued to be maintained, in this third installment of Johnson’s release, From among the dead, produced and exhibited by Netflix, there is no longer anyone who creates a single situation beyond the guessing game itself, and the ideological strokes that the director and writer truffle in its development. The implausibility is absolute, but this does not prevent us from entering into its Dionysian amusement. Of course, as long as you go armed with the most notable of cerebral disconnections and any contact with all types of everyday life.

We could even say that from the dead is, in its tone, in its comic ambitions and even in its portrayal of characters, much closer to A corpse for dessert (1976), the definitive parody of the Christie universe (that character called Mrs. Benson!), than of any of the two crime lady novels from which it could be inspired: Death in the vicarage y The murder of Roger Ackroyd. Johnson, even more palpably than in his two entertaining, but ultimately forgettable, previous installments, composes his film through photography, coloring and artistic direction that also escape any type of realism. Meanwhile, the group of characters surrounding the monsignor of the Catholic Church, and the death being investigated, do not withstand the slightest analysis: they are surely the most unlikely parishioners in the history of religious beliefs.

All this does not have to be negative because, in essence, substance and form come together in that eternal game that is the film, always around temptations. Too long in time, with some extra narrative mannerism, but fundamentally effective. Very short range, but effective for those looking for a while Cluedo. Above all, because there is an outstanding element that nuances the entire framework, and only the very brilliant can do that. That element is physical, interpretive, palpable, and has a name, surname and a disarming smile: Josh O’Connor. His ability to, from the wonderful prologue, ground a film so in the clouds is superb.

No matter how much the director of Brick y The last Jedi insists on wanting to bring the surrounding reality to his gruesome criminal story through a compendium of characters that seems to have escaped from a MAGA convention, it is O’Connor’s interpretive simplicity that best holds the whole together.