When the credits rolled at the London premiere of The Thursday Murder Club on August 21, 2025, there was a palpable sense of anticipation among the cast and the legion of fans who have propelled Richard Osman’s book series to global success. With more than 10 million copies sold and a fifth installment due this autumn, expectations for the film adaptation—now streaming on Netflix after a brief, limited theatrical run—were sky-high. The star-studded cast, including Dame Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Celia Imrie, and Sir Ben Kingsley, felt the weight of those expectations acutely.
“It’s a huge responsibility when you have an audience and the world waiting to see these characters,” Brosnan confessed to the BBC, capturing the nervous excitement that surrounded the project. For fans of Osman’s novels, the film is more than a cozy whodunit; it’s a chance to see beloved characters brought to life by some of Britain’s most celebrated actors.
At its heart, The Thursday Murder Club is a gentle, often self-aware mystery about retirees at the idyllic Coopers Chase retirement village. The group—Elizabeth (Mirren), Ron (Brosnan), Joyce (Imrie), and Ibrahim (Kingsley)—meet every Thursday to solve cold cases for fun. But when a real murder rocks their tranquil community, the amateur sleuths are thrust into a labyrinth of secrets, suspects, and red herrings. As Time notes, the suspects range from a greasy ne’er-do-well with a financial stake in Coopers Chase, to a presumed-dead gangster, and even the offspring of one of the club’s own members. The plot, as reviewers have pointed out, twists and turns gently, prioritizing character and setting over the complexities of the mystery itself.
The film’s setting is as much a star as any member of the cast. Coopers Chase, a fantasy retirement village converted from an English country house, is all rolling green lawns, comfortable apartments, and—somewhat inexplicably—llamas grazing the grounds. Production designer James Merifield and cinematographer Don Burgess imbue the film with a lush, storybook quality, standing in for the fictional village with a restored convent near Kent and the Englefield Estate in Berkshire. “It’s a marvelous setting for the movie’s stars to cavort in,” Time observes, “grand but welcoming at the same time.”
Director Chris Columbus, known for family-friendly hits like Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, and the first two Harry Potter films, brings his signature smoothness to the adaptation. With Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment on board as producer, the film was always destined to be a glossy, crowd-pleasing affair. Columbus leans into the cozy tropes of the genre, but also allows for moments of meta-humor and self-awareness. In one memorable scene, Joyce exclaims, “I feel like we’re in one of those Sunday night dramas about two bright-eyed, feisty old lady detectives outsmarting the police at every turn. Do you feel like that?” Mirren’s Elizabeth retorts acidly, “No. And never use the words bright-eyed, feisty old ladies in my presence again.”
The cast’s chemistry is undeniable, and their camaraderie extended off-screen as well. Brosnan and Kingsley, in particular, formed a close friendship during filming, bonding over a shared love of Laurel and Hardy. “We’d stand around and chat about things we liked and we discovered we both love Laurel and Hardy,” Brosnan told the BBC, before Kingsley launched into a rendition of “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.” Imrie, who plays the cake-baking, soft-spoken Joyce, admitted she waited until after being cast to read the book, not wanting to jinx her chances. Mirren, meanwhile, confessed she hoped all along to play Elizabeth, the mysterious ringleader with a shadowy intelligence background: “When you read that book, you think immediately this could be a movie and then, if it is, I wonder if they’ll ever approach me to play that role, because I’d love to play it. It was sort of a bit of a miracle for me when they did.”
The film doesn’t shy away from the realities of aging. Elizabeth’s husband, played by Jonathan Pryce, is slipping into dementia, and the story opens with the club gathered around the bed of a dying friend in the hospice wing. “It was full of what hangs over the story, not in a morbid way, but we are around the bed of someone that is dying and we’re all of an age where that is going to happen,” Imrie reflected. Kingsley agreed, noting, “It’s not a little comedy. It has some layers to it… a base note that runs through it.” Mirren added, “That’s the great success of the books, isn’t it, the way Richard combines real sadness, the reality that life involves death always… but at the same time, there is this great, natural humane comedy bubbling up all the time.”
Despite the film’s gentle tone and sumptuous visuals, critical reception has been mixed. The Telegraph and The Independent both awarded two stars, criticizing the adaptation as “nefariously lazy” and “so flimsy and digestible, it barely exists.” The Times was more generous, giving four stars and noting that “camp and quietly sad, a franchise is born.” The Guardian landed in the middle, with a three-star review that described the club as “a kind of senior-citizen X-Men group whose collective superpower is invisibility.”
One point of contention has been the film’s limited cinematic release—just 30 cinemas in the UK before its Netflix debut. Mirren expressed disappointment, telling the BBC, “I think it would have done well in the cinema and I wish it was staying for a little longer.” Osman, for his part, expressed gratitude to Netflix for backing the project, noting the challenges of getting films commissioned in the current climate.
Still, for all its gentle ribbing and cozy clichés, The Thursday Murder Club is more than the sum of its parts. It’s a celebration of friendship, resilience, and the idea that adventure—and mischief—don’t have an expiration date. As the cast and fans alike look ahead to possible sequels (with Osman’s next book due this fall), it’s clear that the club’s adventures are just beginning.
