Detective Charles Hayward is recruited by a former flame, Sophia Leonides, to find the culprit of the murder of his grandfather Aristides, a rich patriarch, before Scotland Yard brings unconfortable family secrets to the surface. Circulating through the manor of the deceased, inhabited by his children, their families and the young second wife, Charles soon realizes that each of them can be suspected of the crime, for some reason, including Sophia herself.
Mystery in Crooked house begins as a hard boiled Hammett, with the figure of a detective who has not seen a case for too long and who needs to pay the bills and replay the damp walls of his dark office.

But in reality the most violent clash that the protagonist will face will not be with gunshots or fists with bare hands, but with impertinent questions and elusive answers.

In this, which is one of the children of paper to which Agatha Christie has loved more, of the many who gave birth, the writer has brought to the level of virtue her ability in socio-narrative description, concentrating very different human splits, for psychology and appearance , inside a unit of environment. Just like in a doll’s house, of those of the Victorian era, where those who play move people and objects like a little puppeteer or an omniscient narrator, who knows everything and everything can.
Gilles Paquet-Brenner, who has replaced Neil LaBute in the process of preproduction, acts with exactly the same spirit, weapons of the cinema in hand: every character is a world in its own right, with its setting, its colors, its music, his “genre” of belonging. The result is an effective rally: it does not jump but you do not even get bored to open the many doors of the house and look out on the different miniature worlds. As in every circle, it ends at the starting point, at the entrance of the stairs, under the portrait of the person who started the game.