‘A Murder at the End of the World’ Review: Emma Corrin and Clive Owen Star in FX/Hulu’s Alluring Whodunit

There is so much being said, so much of the time, in FX and Hulu’s A Murder at the End of the World. Its characters are alleged geniuses holed up at a retreat hosted by a tech billionaire, Andy (Clive Owen), who believes that “It is original thought, more than money, oil or even water, that will determine if there is a future to be had.” And so they loaf about their remote Icelandic hotel tossing out big ideas, unveiling their experiments, debating the finer points of climate change or surveillance, dreaming up new ways to save the world.

Yet what becomes clear, in ways that are mostly illuminating but occasionally frustrating, is how little any of this chatter amounts to. At the heart of Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij‘s moody mystery is the bone-deep conviction that what people claim to think matters far less than what they actually feel and what they actually do. Because as becomes apparent when one of the group drops dead on the first night of their week-long retreat, all of the wealth and power and influence in the world can only do so much to save humanity from its own humanness — from our mortal bodies, our inconvenient feelings, our messy impulses.

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If Andy represents a particularly arrogant combination of doomerism and tech optimism, he has a ready foil in protagonist Darby (Emma Corrin). The 24-year-old hacker and amateur sleuth enters as an outsider to his rarified realm — “like a fresh page in staid old court,” Andy remarks, simultaneously complimentary and condescending. Where Andy is eager to dismiss the tragedy as an accident, Darby is sure it’s a murder. After all, she has experience with such things: Her place at the retreat is owed to the critical success of her recent memoir, chronicling her pursuit of an elusive serial killer with the help of her erstwhile boyfriend (Harris Dickinson‘s Bill).

A Murder at the End of the World slips between Darby’s current case and the one that made her reputation, borrowing equally from the clockwork precision of Agatha Christie, the chill of Scandinavian noir and the romance of road trips across the American West. There’s a touch of sci-fi in the mix, too, as Andy introduces bits of technology that lie slightly beyond the edge of what’s possible right now — like a cutting-edge AI named Ray (Edoardo Ballerino) touted by Andy as a combination “personal assistant, teacher, therapist.” Though there’s nothing here to approach the swing-for-the-fences weirdness of the creators’ last TV project, Netflix’s The OA, there’s enough freshness to keep a curious viewer hooked.

In any mode, A Murder at the End of the World is frequently gorgeous to look at. Some of that, surely, can be chalked up to the inherently photogenic severity of Iceland’s wilderness. But it’s thanks as well to production design by Alex DiGerlando that makes every run-down motel or luxury suite look so real you can practically smell them, and directors (Marling or Batmanglij helmed every episode) with an eye for specific, striking details, from the crimson of a coat against snow to the dusty golds of a backwoods road in summer. As befits a story about a detective described in-universe as a “Gen Z Sherlock Holmes,” their camera is sensitive to the idiosyncrasies of their self-consciously special characters.

Some, like Andy or his wife (Marling), are purposely hard to read, given that their smallest interactions reek of performativity. Others conjure entire inner universes through a private smirk or silent eye roll — Raúl Esparza and Jermaine Fowler, as two of the guests, have a knack for popping from the background.

No one is more legible than Darby herself. Corrin does not just convey disbelief or grief or curiosity; their face registers every shade in between every emotion as Darby works through them all. They’re especially affecting in their romance with Dickinson’s Bill, who counters their toughness with a disarming vulnerability.

Such carefully drawn characters keep A Murder at the End of the World afloat over a few rougher patches, including some uneven pacing and the occasional bit of heavy-handed dialogue. That focus on character also arguably keeps the themes from cohering as well as they could. Over seven episodes that range from 40 to 75 minutes, the series’ voracious curiosity hits on topics as wide-ranging as misogyny and wealth inequality. However, only some are tackled head-on, while others are relegated to red herrings or background color as the story increasingly tilts toward more personal concerns.

But the emphasis on individuals over ideas reflects an ultimately humanist core. A Murder at the End of the World‘s most of-the-moment tendency might be not its anxiety about technology, but its self-awareness about the genre it belongs to — one that’s frequently been criticized for glorifying murderous masterminds. Like so many onscreen sleuths before her, Darby suffers from the habit of caring too much about her cases. But she cracks them not by getting into the killer’s mind but by understanding the victims. Her obsession is driven not by a need for personal satisfaction but by a burning desire to see justice done. When Bill suggests she step back for the sake of her own well-being, Darby explodes in fury: “When we let someone die unnamed and unacknowledged, we’re basically saying we’re okay with it.”

It’s a tricky needle to thread, trying to construct a whodunit that deprioritizes the who in favor of the people behind the it; mileage will vary on how successfully you think it’s pulled off. At its worst, the series moves the way Andy’s titans talk, circling its gloomy central concerns without seeming to get much of anywhere for long periods of time. But at its best, it channels Darby’s anguish over existing in a world that can feel unbearably beautiful in one moment and intolerably painful in the next. While Andy and his acolytes fix their eyes on the future, A Murder at the End of the World makes a case for paying attention to what’s already happening now.