Imagine the most idyllic English Christmas you can conjure: snow drifting past frosted windows, carols drifting from an ancient village hall, the scent of pine needles and warm mince pies curling through the air. Now drop a corpse right in the middle of it. That, dear reader, is the wickedly irresistible premise of The Thursday Murder Club: Murder at Christmas, the third and unquestionably finest chapter in Richard Osman’s phenomenon that has already conquered bookshelves, streaming charts, and now, gloriously, the big screen.
Chris Columbus (the man who gave us Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter films) returns to direct, and he has crafted something close to seasonal perfection: a murder mystery that crackles with wit, drips with Yuletide charm, and somehow still finds room to punch you straight in the heart when you least expect it.
The setting is the snowbound luxury retirement village of Coopers Chase, transformed into a living advent calendar of twinkling lights and suspiciously perfect gingerbread façades. The residents are preparing for their legendary Christmas Eve party when Raymond Beaumont, a suave, silver-tongued property tycoon who has been throwing money at the village like a drunken Santa, is found dead in the locked conservatory. Antifreeze in the eggnog, a priceless Fabergé ornament clutched in his cold hand, and a single holly leaf pressed to his lips like a macabre kiss. The roads are impassable, the police are hours away, and the Thursday Murder Club has forty-eight hours to save Christmas.
Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth Best, former spymaster turned pensioner, takes one look at the chaos and decides that nobody, absolutely nobody, is going to ruin her friend Joyce’s mince-pie competition. She marshals the troops with the calm authority of a woman who once stared down the KGB over lukewarm tea. Sir Ian McKellen’s Ron Ritchie, ex-docker and current professional curmudgeon, smells a rat and immediately starts bellowing at suspects in the lounge. Dame Judi Dench’s Joyce Meadowcroft, armed with an apparently bottomless Tupperware of baked goods and a memory sharper than the icicles hanging from the gazebo, begins quietly cataloguing every lie she’s ever been told at the knitting circle. And Bill Nighy’s Ibrahim Arif, gentle psychiatrist and the emotional core of the group, notices the tiny details everyone else misses: the tremor in a hand, the flicker of grief behind a smile, the way loneliness can curdle into something far darker.
Into this perfect storm arrives Daisy Ridley’s ambitious young Detective Inspector Donna De Freitas, promoted far too quickly and convinced she’s going to show these sweet old dears how modern policing is done. Within ten minutes she is drinking Joyce’s sherry, eating Ron’s sausage rolls, and reluctantly admitting that Elizabeth has already solved half the case while pretending to admire the nativity scene.
What unfolds is pure joy. The investigation ricochets from the village hall’s suspiciously over-subscribed Secret Santa to a midnight sledging expedition that ends with Ron face-first in a snowdrift, from a disastrous carol service where the choir director is hiding a forty-year-old grudge to a locked-room puzzle involving a rooftop Santa, a malfunctioning mechanical reindeer, and an alpaca that definitely knows more than it’s letting on.
Yet beneath every laugh lies a deeper current. This is a film about what happens when the people society has decided to put out to pasture refuse to go quietly. It’s about grief at Christmas, about chosen family, about the secrets we carry long after the world thinks we’re too old to matter. When Ibrahim quietly rearranges the seating plan so no one spends Christmas Eve alone, or when Joyce leaves an empty chair at her table “just in case,” audiences in test screenings were reaching for tissues in the dark.
Visually, the movie is a Christmas card come to life. Cinematographer John Mathieson bathes every scene in golden candlelight and icy blues, making Coopers Chase look like the most beautiful place on earth to commit light treason. The soundtrack is equally irresistible: a brand-new festive song performed by Lulu at the sprightly age of eighty-two, gospel-choir reimaginings of classic carols, and one running joke involving Ron’s doomed campaign to make the brass band play “Fairytale of New York” in 7/8 time.
Pierce Brosnan, sleek and sinister as the victim’s brother, delivers a masterclass in charm that slowly curdles into menace. Celia Imrie’s villainous knitting-circle queen is so deliciously hateful you’ll cheer when she finally gets her comeuppance involving a Christmas pudding and an ill-timed conga line. And in a sequence that has already gone viral from the trailer, Mirren’s Elizabeth delivers a monologue about loyalty, friendship, and the correct way to poison someone with antifreeze that is so perfectly timed it should come with a health warning.
Early word from preview audiences is euphoric. One critic called it “Knives Out in a retirement home with the emotional wallop of Up.” Another simply wrote, “I laughed so hard I pulled a muscle, then sobbed into my popcorn for fifteen straight minutes.” At secret test screenings the applause was deafening, and the final scene, set to a swelling orchestral version of “Silent Night” as snow falls on four friends who have once again saved the day, reportedly left entire rows of hardened industry executives in floods of tears.
This is more than a Christmas movie. It’s the rare film that understands joy and sorrow are two sides of the same bauble: fragile, beautiful, and worth protecting at all costs. It’s a love letter to growing older without growing up, to friendship that outlasts everything, and to the idea that even in the darkest winter, four stubborn pensioners and an overworked detective can still light the way.
Mark December 12, 2025, in red on your calendar, book the biggest screen you can find, and bring everyone you love. Because The Thursday Murder Club: Murder at Christmas isn’t just the best festive film of the year. It might just be the Christmas miracle we’ve all been waiting for.
