The Thursday Murder Club

Sunset in the Jigsaw Room

There is a peculiar dissonance in the genre of "cozy crime." We are asked to view murder—the ultimate violation—through a lens of tea cozies, knitwear, and polite afternoon chats. In *The Thursday Murder Club* (2025), director Chris Columbus leans into this dissonance with the enthusiasm of a host serving cake at a wake. Adapting Richard Osman’s literary phenomenon was never going to be an exercise in grit; it required a filmmaker who understands the mechanics of warmth. Columbus, the architect of *Harry Potter’s* golden glow and *Mrs. Doubtfire’s* familial hugs, transforms the Coopers Chase retirement village not into a waiting room for death, but into a lush, vibrant sanctuary that feels more like a Wes Anderson diorama than a hospice.

Visually, the film is an act of defiance against the drab aesthetics usually assigned to the elderly. Columbus saturates the screen with sunlight and manicured greenery, framing the "Jigsaw Room"—the club's headquarters—as a war room of wit rather than a parlor of decay. The camera moves with a sprightly energy that matches the internal vitality of its protagonists, even if their knees might disagree. However, this glossy, high-contrast sheen (a hallmark of high-budget streaming releases) occasionally threatens to suffocate the narrative’s stakes. The violence, when it intrudes upon this idyll in the form of the murders of Tony Curran and Ian Ventham, feels less like a tragedy and more like a plot point to be tidied up before supper. The film’s visual language is so committed to comfort that it risks rendering the danger theoretical.

Yet, the film survives its own sweetness because of the formidable humanity of its quartet. We are not watching characters; we are watching a distinct generation of acting royalty take a victory lap. Helen Mirren, as the enigmatic ex-spy Elizabeth, provides the film’s spinal column. She plays Elizabeth not as a grandmotherly sleuth, but as a retired shark swimming in a shallow pond. Her performance is a masterclass in economy; a single arched eyebrow from Mirren conveys more menace than the entire subplot involving local gangsters.

But the true emotional ballast lies in the quiet devastation of the subplot involving Elizabeth’s husband, Stephen (Jonathan Pryce), who is slipping away into dementia. In a film preoccupied with solving the puzzles of the dead, Columbus wisely slows down to witness the unsolvable puzzle of the living mind fading away. These scenes are handled with a tenderness that pierces the film's candy-colored shell. They remind us that while murder is a fantasy we use to entertain ourselves, the loss of self is the true phantom haunting the hallways of Coopers Chase.

Ultimately, *The Thursday Murder Club* functions less as a mystery and more as a manifesto on relevance. Columbus and his cast assert that the hunger for adventure does not expire at seventy. While the mystery itself is somewhat pedestrian—a labyrinth of red herrings that unravels with arguably too much ease—the resolution is secondary to the camaraderie. The film is a cinematic warm bath: it challenges nothing, reinvents nothing, but offers a profound, gentle reassurance that even in the twilight, there is still light enough to solve the puzzle.