As Death on the Nile finally releases in theatres, reassessing Agatha Christie's claustrophobic mysteries in pandemic times

Back in 2016, before the streaming era monopolised, and therefore also restricted, your approach to a more diverse palette of cinema, I watched the largely unheralded BBC series And Then There Were None in a single, overnight sitting. Studded with some heavyweight names — Charles Dance and Sam Neill for one — from the world of acting, it was an adaptation that joined many others in the continuing, almost undeniable pleasures of watching an Agatha Christie work come to life. On paper, a Christie story has some key characteristics — a motley and lately, multi-cultural cast, a mystery/tragedy that befalls them, a Hercule Poirot-like colourful anchor, and of course the many unlikely twists that lead us to some sort of cathartic unveiling. But time holds the capacity to alter even historic occupations. As A Death On The Nile releases in theatres, and  Knives Out 2 waits in the wings, it is important to consider that over the last two years, courtesy a beguiling and undefinable pandemic, the idea of being stuck in a place with people, that formed the core thesis for most exotic Christie mysteries, has changed.   In February 2020, the British carrier Diamond Princess became the first ship to witness a COVID-19 outbreak on-board. The ship was docked and effectively quarantined in Yokohama. Thousands tested positive, while nine people lost their lives. Because the cruise business is elite, and deceptively private and prohibitive, numbers and details of just how many ships or people were disrupted or destroyed by this invisible virus is a number that we can only hope will eventually become public someday. I can only imagine the claustrophobic blindness, the paranoia of an invisible enemy ripping through an enclosed, practically secluded patch of life on the earth. If you have ever even been on a scaled down version of a generic floating vessel, deep into the sea, any form of unanticipated evil or villainy is practically an apocalyptic event. It is what disaster movies like Titanic and Poseidon have played into – this feeling of being marooned at some indecipherable corner of a sea vast enough to outlast and outwit your attempts at survival. From the global hit Lost to most recently, M Night Shyamalan’s whimsical _Old_ , people have been stuck in places where they must figure out antecedents that threaten their chances of survival. In Christie’s stories, the conflict is of a different nature. The antecedents are obvious – someone is dead - but what lingers is paralysing tension and doubt that eventually seeds the various ideas of the future. Of course, secrets and myths unspool as part of the Christie framework but to a pandemic generation, the idea of a reveal may no longer feel like the salvation it used to. To even think of being in closed, shared spaces with strangers has become traumatic. Moreover, to do it with a sense of vacationing is perhaps a habit we will have to radically re-grasp in years to come. It just is not possible to jump back into trains, boats, and sealed metro cabins without dreading not what, but the ‘how’ of the things that could happen to you.

Christie’s framework of limiting characters by geography allowed us to view them as ripple effects of each other.

As in these characters seem more intriguing because they act in response to others, and that therefore becomes their geography – a sort of collective chaos. But with the pandemic having rendered us alone and similar, hooked to our machines with only a virtual certificate of participation in the close-talking, shoulder-rubbing antics of a group, simply does not hold the same charm or the nuance. When the trailer of Death on the Nile first hit screens, I half wished that the film had been updated to suit the present-day paranoia of civilisation. Packing people in one place together simply does not yield to the exotic overtures that the same work could have been mined for before the pandemic.  You could argue that makes Christie’s work a portal into a pre-COVID era, but then it loses the cache of being a prescient analogy. So which one is it? Exotic trips that previously played host to romances and comedies will now be looked with a grimmer lens. The pandemic has re-contextualised Christie’s work. It can be looked at from either of two perspectives: acknowledge it for the author’s foresight to argue that a lot of humans gathered in one place could only unravel in a variety of ways or remodel its mysteries to channel the nausea that close gatherings now represent. Given Kenneth Branagh’s tepid, babbling outing the first time, Death on the Nile will have to do more than just hope its headlining stars speak over its limitations. As it turns out, the mystique of miscellany within an unpredictable, confined space can only do so much if you cannot, like Knives Out, use a compelling lens. Either way, Christie’s work has accrued a new relevance, and may continue to do so when and if the pandemic and its social notoriety chooses to leave us. Death on the Nile will release in cinemas on 11 February. Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.