The Thursday Murder Club Returns: A Cold Case, A Body in a Nightgown, and a Retirement Home Full of Secrets

The beloved sleuths of The Thursday Murder Club are back — and this time, the stakes are higher, the suspects cleverer, and the mysteries far darker than ever before. The film adaptation of Richard Osman’s bestselling novel opens not with tea and biscuits, but with blood on the carpet — a decades-old cold case that still sends chills through the fictional English village of Fairhaven.

It’s the 1970s. A woman named Angela Hughes plummets from a second-floor window, her white nightgown streaked with crimson from a knife wound to the chest. The fall didn’t kill her — the stab did. But the details don’t add up. Why didn’t the man who discovered her moments later save her? What really happened in those final, frantic seconds? “This one stinks like a rat up a drainpipe,” growls Ron (Pierce Brosnan), the ex-union firebrand turned amateur detective, as he peers over the yellowed police photos.

Ron is just one member of the eponymous Thursday Murder Club — a motley crew of retirees living at the scenic yet deceptively tranquil Coopers Chase retirement community. Together with the unflappable Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), the erudite Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley), and the ever-curious Joyce (Celia Imrie), the group spends its golden years digging up cold cases and solving murders that have long baffled the local authorities. What began as a pastime has turned into a full-blown mission: to uncover the truth, no matter how inconvenient it may be.

Directed by Chris Columbus — whose filmography spans from Home Alone to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone — this adaptation captures Osman’s signature blend of warmth, wit, and wickedness. Columbus leans into the charm of his silver-haired detectives but doesn’t shy away from the darker corners of their world. As Elizabeth coolly observes early on, “Murder doesn’t retire.”

Murder Close to Home

When a new wave of killings strikes Coopers Chase, the Thursday Murder Club finds itself drawn into a web of deceit that winds from the genteel lounges of the retirement home to the boardrooms of the powerful. The trouble begins when Coopers Chase co-owner Ian Ventham (David Tennant), embroiled in a nasty divorce and desperate to cash out, announces his plan to sell the property to an aggressive developer. His business partner, Tony Curran (Geoff Ball), refuses to go along quietly — and soon turns up dead, bludgeoned in his own home.

The residents are shocked, but not the Club. They’ve seen enough bodies to know when a crime scene doesn’t tell the whole story. When Ian himself collapses and dies days later during a residents’ protest, Elizabeth’s sharp instincts kick in: “Two deaths, one motive — that’s no coincidence.”

As the investigation unfolds, the suspects multiply. There’s Ron’s estranged son Jason (Tom Ellis), a retired boxing champion with bruised knuckles and an even more bruised reputation; there’s Bobby Tanner (Richard E. Grant), a slippery career criminal with a flair for the dramatic; and there’s even whisper of an inside connection — perhaps someone once trusted by the Club itself.

The Ghost of Penny Gray

One of the film’s most poignant threads centers on Penny Gray (Susan Kirkby), a pioneering police officer and one of the original members of the Thursday Murder Club. Penny was a trailblazer in the 1970s — the only woman on her local force, battling both crime and the sexism of her colleagues. She shared a deep friendship with Elizabeth, bonded by their mutual respect and razor-sharp intellect. But Penny’s investigative career was cut short by a debilitating stroke, leaving her confined to a hospice bed, speechless but aware, her mind flickering behind unblinking eyes.

Her husband, John (Paul Freeman), a gentle former veterinarian, tends to her with quiet devotion. “The painful thing as you get older,” Helen Mirren reflects, “is that you lose people — not just to death, but to time, to memory, to illness. Elizabeth’s visits to Penny are a reminder of everything they’ve both lost, and everything they still fight to preserve.”

For Elizabeth, Penny’s unfinished case — the death of Angela Hughes — becomes personal. As the old friends’ stories converge, the past and present blur, revealing connections that reach deep into Coopers Chase itself. Penny’s files, long forgotten in a box beneath her hospice bed, hold the final piece of the puzzle.

A Charming and Chilling Whodunit

The film’s ensemble cast brings Osman’s quirky, endearing characters to vivid life. Brosnan’s Ron is all bluster and heart; Mirren’s Elizabeth is magnetic, a strategist with MI6-like precision; Kingsley gives Ibrahim a gentle melancholy; and Imrie’s Joyce provides sharp humor and surprising emotional depth.

Columbus balances these performances with a brisk, elegantly woven narrative — equal parts cozy mystery and sharp social satire. Beneath the laughter and garden-party charm, The Thursday Murder Club is a story about aging, friendship, and resilience in the face of mortality.

By the time the credits roll, Coopers Chase feels less like a retirement village and more like a microcosm of British life — brimming with secrets, scandals, and a reminder that curiosity, once kindled, never grows old.