A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, adapted from Holly Jackson’s 2019 novel of the same name, starts off in a pretty unpromising fashion. The plot is set in England, but really, we’re in the Netflix world where almost every series looks the same aesthetically (A Good Girl's.. looks strikingly similar to series like Stranger Things, Sex Education, Riverdale, etc.). The teenagers are dressed the same way, every frame is lit up with the streaming platform’s signature saturated yet colourful palette, and the music desperately tries to keep things upbeat. The scenes in the first episode have a checklist kind of feeling, and it seems like the makers just want to finish shooting one page of the script after another.
But fortunately, once the core plot kicks off and the setting is established, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder takes off and becomes quite engaging. Having a novel as its base material helps: the characters, headlined by a Dora-like Pip Fitz-Amobi (Emma Myers), quickly come alive, the motives are neatly defined, and the whole ‘plot’ is well-designed, without which a murder mystery can come crumbling down even if other aspects are done well.
To its credit, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder consistently stays true to the world and atmosphere that it sets up. It also helps that the casting is bang on. Not only do the actors look their part, but in an unnecessary yet delightful touch, even siblings and family members look like they are actually related to each other.
This series is evidently targeted at a younger set of audiences; even the policeman here behaves like a teenager would. As a result, it takes a rather simplistic approach to filmmaking. We get plenty of expository dialogue and quick flashes, especially after major breakthroughs. The characters literally explain whole sets of incidents to each other, as if to fill the audience up and make sure they are following the plot. In one scene, we are first shown a message; a character mentions that it is a confession, and then the confession is read out loud.
Multiple times in the story, Pip, who is investigating a murder for her high school evaluations, just keeps happening to be in key places. Pip takes her dog for a walk and just happens to come across a mysterious place that will play a big role in the plot. Pip just happens to be in the same place as two suspects talking to each other. An announcement about an important event happens immediately after Pip finds out about it.
There is also an alarming lack of seriousness that the characters seem to exhibit. After getting a seriously threatening message from a stranger, Pip sits in her room and plays cards. After getting locked up in a room by a suspect, two characters sit beside each other and calmly discuss their stories.
When a pathbreaking discovery is made about the accused murderer, his brother (Zain Iqbal) doesn’t showcase any shock but rather cheese-talks with Pip. And this character, despite Iqbal’s competent performance, becomes the series’ biggest minus. Force-fitting a romance in a story like this keeps cutting the gradual momentum that’s been built, and this angle constantly sucks out the genuine tension that some of the scenes have.
The series seems to prioritise the 'solving a murder’ aspect more than anything else; hence, we get twists just to add one more piece to the puzzle. In a typical mistake for a mystery thriller, an external character is suddenly introduced near the end, just to give us an important piece of information. And it’s also a bizarre decision to have two middling end-twists instead of one. This dilutes the impact of both discoveries, making the last episode rather underwhelming.
However, despite its shortcomings, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is a series that knows what it's doing, and it happily settles as an engaging enough murder mystery. It is designed to cater to a specific age group—audiences for whom a Star Wars reference might go over their heads. And it caters well to what this demographic might expect from it, delivering ample loads of relatable conflicts, intriguing plot points, and a mostly tight-knit plot trajectory.
Creator: Poppy Cogan
Cast: Emma Myers, Zain Iqbal, Asha Banks, Raiko Gohara, Jude Morgan-Collie, Yali Topol Margalith
Streamer: Netflix
Rating: 3/5 stars
(This story originally appeared on Cinema Express)