The ABC Murders (2018)

Lore & Background

In the world of the 2018 film, Poirot is not the immaculate, moustache-waxing perfectionist of the page but a restless, almost feral intellect who moves through 1930s England like a storm front. His methods remain rooted in the same principle—order imposed upon chaos, the small detail that unravels the great lie—but his presentation is that of a man perpetually on the verge of shedding his own skin. The film's visual language, with its long shadows, rain-slicked station platforms, and claustrophobic interiors, recasts the classic whodunit as something closer to a psychological descent. The serial-killer structure of the novel—murders following the alphabetical route of the A.B.C. railway guide—translates into a road-movie rhythm, each town a slightly darker room than the last. Poirot's investigation becomes less a parlor game and more a hunt through a landscape that is itself complicit in the violence. The supporting cast, including Captain Proctor, Harriet Lemon, and Inspector Japp, orbit this central figure with the wary respect of characters who sense they are inside someone else's puzzle. What the film preserves is the essential architecture of Christie's plot: the anonymous letters, the alphabetical trail, the final revelation that the killer was never a stranger but an intimate. What it reshapes is the emotional temperature. Where the novel invites the reader to play detective alongside Poirot, the film asks the audience to feel the dread of being watched, of the alphabet closing in like a noose letter by letter.

In Their Own Story

The rain had not stopped for three days. Poirot stood on the platform at Sanderford, his coat collar turned up against a wind that smelled of coal smoke and wet wool, and watched the A.B.C. express hiss into the station like a serpent uncoiling. The letter in his breast pocket—A for Argyll, B for Brixton, C for the town he was about to walk into—felt warm, as though the ink were still wet with someone's intention. He did not look up at the signalman's box, did not scan the crowd for a face that did not belong. He simply breathed, counted to four, and let the small, terrible geometry of the case arrange itself behind his eyes. Somewhere in the crowd, a woman in a grey coat was watching him watch the train. She smiled. He did not. The train departed, and the alphabet advanced by one.

Reader's Guide

Directed by andrew Dominik and released in 2018 as a theatrical feature, the film stars Johnny Depp as Poirot alongside Ewan McGregor (Captain Proctor), Louise Loughland (Harriet Lemon), Sheila Chand (Mrs. Ferrars), and Aidan Gillen (Inspector Japp). The production, backed by 20th Century Fox, leans heavily into a noir aesthetic—low-key lighting, desaturated palettes, and a score that favors brooding tension over the light, waltz-like cues associated with earlier Poirot media. Christie's core plot is retained: the alphabetical murder trail, the anonymous A.B.C. letters, the final twist identifying the killer as a close associate. However, the film compresses the novel's multi-town itinerary, trims several secondary suspects, and accelerates the pacing to suit a two-hour runtime. The tone shifts markedly; where the book is a brisk, almost playful procedural, the film dwells on atmosphere, paranoia, and the physicality of pursuit. Depp's Poirot is the most radical departure: disheveled, restless, physically aggressive in his thinking, closer to a rock-star mystic than a fastidious European. His famous moustache is present but less polished; his rituals are replaced by a kind of kinetic, almost feral intensity. Cultural reception was largely negative. Critics and many long-time Christie fans found the performance unrecognizable as Poirot and the plot handling too compressed for the material's intricacies. Nevertheless, the film remains a talking point in adaptation circles as a bold, if flawed, attempt to reframe the detective in a darker, more cinematic register. It introduced the interpretation that Poirot's genius is not calm and ordered but volatile, almost dangerous—a reading that, while unfaithful to Christie's text, resonates with a modern appetite for morally ambiguous protagonists.

Did You Know?

• Johnny Depp reportedly developed his physical approach to Poirot by studying how the character might move if he were a musician rather than a scholar, emphasizing rhythm and improvisation over stillness.
• The film's alphabetical murder structure mirrors the real A.B.C. railway guidebook that existed in 1930s Britain, a detail Christie borrowed from the actual travel literature of the era.
• andrew Dominik had previously directed the 2007 film No Country for Old Men's spiritual sibling No Country for Old Men (2007) alongside the Coen Brothers, bringing a neo-noir sensibility that heavily influenced this adap
• The 2018 film is one of the few major Poirot adaptations in which the detective's famous wax-and-arrange moustache ritual is largely absent, replaced by a more naturalistic, less performed physicality.