Evil Under the Sun (1982)

 

Evil Under the Sun (1982)

6/10

Starring

Peter Ustinov

Jane Birkin

Colin Blakely

Nicholas Clay

Directed by Guy Hamilton

Evil Under the Sun is not as cool or good as the movie Death on the Nile (1978), which also starred Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. The movie had a real problem: it took almost an hour for the murder to happen. Those first sixty minutes are not the most entertaining. However, once the murder finally occurs, the film pulls you in, as is always the case with Christie’s work. After that point, the story gets very, very interesting because you genuinely want to know who just helped rid the world of such an awful person.

The victim is a character so well-placed in the story that, to be honest, her death feels like a relief—even to you, the viewer. Her personality is incredibly irritating, and her total disregard for her stepdaughter makes her even more unlikeable than she already is.

The movie is based on Agatha Christie’s 1941 book of the same name. The plot follows the familiar Christie formula: wherever Poirot goes, there’s always someone universally disliked who ends up dead, leaving everyone else as a suspect. It also features Maggie Smith, who previously appeared in Death on the Nile (1978) with Ustinov, playing yet another suspect.

The story begins with Hercule Poirot heading off on holiday. Before his trip, he meets a wealthy man who has just been scammed out of a very expensive jewel by a woman. Poirot, during his vacation, encounters the same woman. She is flirtatious, attractive, and young-looking but has a knack for mocking everyone around her while glorifying herself. Naturally, this makes her disliked by almost everyone, and when she’s murdered, everyone is under suspicion.

Poirot is drawn into solving the case, but there’s a twist: everyone has an alibi, and those alibis are corroborated by other people.

The movie has some serious flaws, though, and one glaring issue stands out to me. How did Patrick get Myra to accompany him? He seemed determined to deter her, yet she suddenly shows up, asking to join him. Neither Poirot nor the movie explains this, leaving a significant gap in the story.

Additionally, there’s a lot of name-shuffling and notable changes compared to the book, which I feel made the movie less effective. These alterations didn’t help the story and left it falling short of its potential.

What I did enjoy, once the movie finally picked up, was the complexity of the alibis. Every suspect seems to have one, and those alibis are often corroborated by someone else. What’s clever is that most of the corroborating witnesses don’t even realize they’re doing it. Like the book, the movie encourages you to think deeply, examine the events, and figure out which thread to pull to unravel the truth.

Overall, it’s a decent movie to watch, but you need patience for the story to take off—it’ll take almost an hour. If you can handle the slow start, it’s worth the effort to see how the mystery unfolds.