A Murder at the End of the World is a mini series by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, who created cult fan favourite The OA. It stars Emma Corrin and Harris Dickinson, with a stellar supporting cast, including Brit Marling herself, Clive Owen, Joan Chen, Raúl Esparza, Alice Braga, Pegah Ferydoni, Jermaine Fowler, Ryan J. Haddad and Edoardo Ballerini. UK viewers can watch it on Disney Plus.
This review is going to be spoiler heavy, so I’m going to put most of it behind a cut. I don’t usually review TV shows, but this mini series profoundly affected me and I feel like I need to write about it.
The Good
I loved A Murder at the End of the World. Aspects of it were sheer artistry. The Icelandic landscapes were breathtakingly beautiful; even the hotel scenes were stunning. There was clever, noir influenced use of light and colour, and the costume choices were inspired; the designers explain their choices here. The soundtrack for AMATEOW is incredible and has introduced me to some great new musicians. Many of the locations, which Atlas of Wonders lovingly details, are real places; you can get a drink at Ray’s Tavern, or swim in the same pool as Bill and Darby, at the Big Horn Lodge.
The flashbacks were some of the most emotionally affecting television I’ve seen in 2023 – or ever. It charts Darby and Bill slowly getting to know each other, meeting up, falling in love, and investigating the Silver Doe Killer. Most of the scenes were shot in a warm, nostalgic, golden hour light. Their love story was set to a dreamy, retro soundtrack of Frank Ocean, Khruangbin, Leon Bridges and Nancy Wilson.
There’s a lovely scene where the two begin singing along to Annie Lennox’ “No more I love you’s”. The sheer elation of the moment, coupled with the poignant foreshadowing of the lyrics, is a bittersweet and beautiful combination. The actors have said since that the headbanging was improvised; Harris Dickinson said that he wished they’d gotten a singer to dub his lines. I’m glad they didn’t; it would have detracted from how real and joyful it felt.
The consensus on Reddit was that the flashback scenes were far better than the main plot, and I agreed.
However, on reflection, I think the flashback scenes were the main plot. The central mistake has been assuming that Darby is Sherlock or Poirot or Marlowe, and that the story is the murder mystery.
The story is their relationship.
The Bad
In contrast the scenes in the Icelandic hotel seemed cold, stilted, wrong, in a way that was hard to quantify.
I found myself agreeing with a funny Evening Standard article that suggested that two troubled Gen Z sleuths falling in love and investigating true crime was the better show. I felt a little angry and cheated by the ending at first (subsequent viewings revealed that I’d missed a lot of small clues).
There is valid criticism that the present day scenes were too rushed and disconnected to pair well. A stellar cast was given little air time, and as a result it was hard to care about, or get to know them.
There are hints about the characters’ real personalities and situations if you look. David is performatively obnoxious, but he’s also rushes to get Darby tea when she’s upset. Lee, timorous, jumpy and hypervigilant, exhibits all the classic signs of being abused. We get incredible glimpses into Rohan’s motivations and psyche.
But I’d have loved to see more of them. Ziba is often remembered as a singer; she’s actually a feminist activist and E2E encryption expert. Martin is an expert filmmaker, which never becomes relevant. Oliver’s funny, incisive and can be very sweet; why do we find all that out in the second to last episode?
And present day Darby is very hard to root for.
Darby Hart
Emma Corrin is obviously a great actor. They infuse teenage Darby with warmth, life, and fun. Even when she’s avoidant, cold or obsessive, Corrin’s portrayal makes the character relatable and human.
Which makes the Icelandic scenes more jarring. 24 year old Darby seems like she’s not really there. She’s withdrawn, remote. The character’s delivery is unsure and quavering, in stark contrast to her 18 year old self’s gravelly self assurance. Granted, the character spends most of the present day grieving, sedated, drugged, concussed or recovering from serious injury. But 24 year old Darby feels less mature and together than her younger counterpart.
And she just wasn’t very likeable. Darby meets her ex for the first time in years – and punches him. She asks him to go for a drink – when she knows he’s sober. He compliments her and tries to reconnect, and she responds by making a crude joke. She aggressively hassles the staff, puts other people in danger and at one point commits a fairly appalling act of betrayal.
I’m generally fond of an Unlikeable Woman as protagonist; Ottessa Moshfegh is one of my favourite authors. But the lack of a real internal monologue – outside of the bookending narration – meant that it was difficult to understand her or what she was playing at.
Bill Farrah
A Twitter post described Bill as “the most ‘man written by a woman’ of all time”. And that tallies.
They meet through a shared interest, and become friends first. He hacks a light system to say Happy Birthday, in a way that is meaningful to her. Remembers her favourite coffee combo, and brings it to her, even though he hates it. He likes her musical taste, and grifts to get them a motel room when she wants a bed for the night. He compliments Darby’s intellect, not her looks. You see him being considerate and thoughtful of Paula, their forum friend, and telling the SDK survivor, Marta Diaz, how brave she is.
Bill arranges their first meeting in a public place, mindful of Darby’s comfort and safety. He refuses to take advantage of her when drunk. Waits for her to initiate sex with him, and when she does, checks in with her during the act. He talks about his feelings, and expresses love before she does.
Later when they meet in Iceland, he’s risking his life to rescue a platonic friend from a domestic violence situation. A famous feminist activist expresses admiration for his work. He’s great with kids, and pleased to discover he has a son. He even packed the sweater he wore when he and Darby first met.
I kept expecting to find out that he was working for Andy or was actually the killer – but no, Bill Farrah really was that perfect.
Intimacy and Authenticity
“Who cares about him? He’s nothing. He’s the result of faulty programming… he’s boring and predictable, like the most basic code. You want the killer to have meaning. He doesn’t have meaning. He’s just a killer.” – Bill Farrah
Some have suggested that Bill’s traumatised bathtub rant is a little on the nose. I think he makes a valuable if heavy handed point about the desperation of society to see killers as monsters. As separate, special, other, when most often they’re just badly wired humans. A product of society and upbringing and lax, partial law enforcement. It’s tied up with victim blaming and morbid curiosity.
But then, the words in that scene aren’t really important.
The important part is Bill, distraught, begging Darby to tell him how she feels. And she says she feels tired.
You can argue that violence is so pervasive for women that it becomes background. We can’t get excited or outraged because it’s just the fabric of our lives.
But the context here is that Darby had emotionally blackmailed Bill into breaking into a serial killer’s house. When caught, he stepped in front of her, prepared to take a bullet for the woman he loved. When SDK shoots himself instead, Bill is spattered in the killer’s blood. He’s in the tub scrubbing that blood from his skin.
When she gets in the bath with him, he clings to her, clearly devastated. She responds by talking about the killer, speculating on his motives, and whether or not he’d been following them on Reddit. It goes beyond detachment and into a disturbing and pathological coldness.
Actor Harris Dickinson has said in interviews that this was the point where Bill realised that Darby was never going to give him the sort of loving, close, intimate relationship he craved.
The Murder
“I love mysteries, and I watch a lot of them, and most of them have a very similar beginning… the body of a young, beautiful woman. And usually, she’s naked or mutilated or covered in blood. And there’s a charge to that image…the dead woman on screen is such an engine for it that it can drive an hour, two hours, 10 hours of narrative storytelling.” – Brit Marling
Brit & Zal talked about wanting to subvert the genre. To pick that young woman off the floor, to wipe her face and put some clothes on her. To avoid that gratuitous and eroticised blood and gore that permeates detective stories and police procedurals. It’s why they show the dead women in the flashbacks as clean bare bones, rather than mutilated bodies. It’s why the sleuth is a young woman; and why the beautiful victim lying half naked in a pool of their own blood is a man.
Narratively, Bill’s death makes perfect sense. The stunning, angelic woman who dies tragically in order to motivate the cold, avoidant, substance abusing sleuth is a staple of the genre. When the showrunners were interviewed on the podcast Script Apart, it was pointed out – “if this were a male detective, and his female ex from 7 years ago turned up, looking beautiful, and they went for a walk in the snow, you’d be expecting her to die.”
Of course, the difference is that we get to know Bill. We see firsthand how vital, kind and charismatic he is. His death feels outrageous because the show runners make us fall in love with Bill. By the end, we love him as much as – maybe more than – Darby does. And that’s the point.
It’s worth interrogating whether part of the outrage we feel is due to that gender subversion. But it’s not the whole picture. I think we only feel for Bill, feel outraged by his death, because Darby told his story. It works as a scathing critique and redemption of true crime. His death is an outrage, a tragedy, a wound; but they all are, or should be.
The Big Mistake
Bill isn’t wrong when he says the killer is boring. Most are. A litany of bad childhoods and traumatic brain injuries and countless missed opportunities to help and redirect them. The vast majority of their sprees could have been stopped or reduced with very basic police work. Killers target the marginalised because they know the police won’t properly investigate their murders. Every single one is aided & abetted by societal prejudice and who constitutes a ‘good’ victim.
Look at Bill. People were all too ready to assume that the artist with the face tattoos overdosed. His sweet personality, long term sobriety, how good he was with kids – all irrelevant in how he was perceived, categorised and dismissed by society.
On my first watch, I didn’t feel as though Darby grew or developed at all. Bill, who was seeking intimacy, honesty and love with Darby, said “I feel like I’d have to die for you to love me.” And… he was right? His reward for fidelity and devotion is that he ends up as fodder in a true crime book? Really?
Later I realised that Darby pulling back from the Big Mistake, and centring the victim, was her development. She prioritises the living, on getting Lee and Zoomer to safety, over bringing Andy to justice. Darby reckons with her past and accepts responsibility for it. She also admits that she loved Bill very much; something I don’t think she ever told him in life.
This was a redemptive, healing arc, and very trauma informed. I just felt myself wishing for more. But in reality, most growth is incremental, slow, non linear – and often frustrating to both yourself and those around you.
In the End
I think when Bill came to Iceland after reading her book, he thought that Darby had matured. He felt he understood her motivations better by learning about her childhood, and that she had grappled with their shared past.
It’s why the later scene where she reads her book to Lee & Oliver is important. For a murder mystery narrative, it’s contrived and makes no sense. But it’s crucial to the real story of their relationship and Darby’s progress as a human. It highlights that she hadn’t ever accepted responsibility for her part in their breakup, or what she put him through, until that moment.
It’s a shame her personal growth had to come at the expense of Bill’s life, but it’s a fate that thousands of fictional women share.
On their road trip he says he fell for her three times, and the third time hadn’t happened yet. In my opinion, his smile as he slips unconscious behind the glass, was that third time.
As sad as it was, he really did need to die for her to love him.
However, the actor who played Bill has partly contradicted this view. He has said in a few interviews that Bill smiled because he was content, complete.
Bill had lived a rich full life; he’d helped others and made a difference to the world. He died to protect his son, with the woman he loved by his side. An enviable and noble end for a good man.
As Sian would say, what a way to go.
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