I watched the new Agatha Christie adaptation of Towards Zero. It’s one of my favourite Christie books, so I really wanted to like it. Well, the settings and costumes are beautiful. I didn’t mind any of the casting. But it suffered from extensive changes of the basic plot, and I don’t understand why so many modern adaptations of Christie do this. It wasn’t as bad as The Pale Horse, but it sure didn’t work well. I think it’s because Christie’s plots are very tight, basically everything you ever learn about a character, or the things that happen, are essential to it. Even clothes descriptions are either clues, or points to essential characteristics. So if you change something in the plot, then you have to do a lot of additional changes to make the plot work, and in the end you are juggling a lot of eggs, and more often than not, it all ends in a mess. And often not necessary, because there is so much unsaid in a Christie novel that you can add a lot of stuff without changing the basic plot. Like making Mark black in the recent adaption of Murder Is Easy, or moving the timeframe to the 50s instead of 30s. The first change works because Mark is already an outsider in the little English village, so that change basically just underlines that. And the second change doesn't matter much as the original novel has few markers that says it’s set in the 30s anyway.
Spoilers below the cut.
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So all in all I was underwhelmed. I’m well aware that things that work in books may not work in screen adaptations, but I found most of the changes here just weird, and not well grounded into the story.