A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder Review: This murder mystery has enough to enjoy despite its shortcomings
The book adaptation goes a long way in furnishing a lot of detail that’s probably harder to achieve in a film script
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, adapted from Holly Jackson’s 2019 novel of the same name, starts off pretty unpromisingly. The plot is situated in England, but really, we’re in Netflix World, where almost every series looks the same aesthetically (A Good Girls.. looks strikingly similar to series like Stranger Things, Sex Education, Riverdale, etc.). The teenagers are dressed the same way, every frame is lit up with the streaming platform’s signature saturated-but-colourful palette, and the music desperately tries to keep things upbeat. The scenes in the first episode have a checklist kind of feeling, and it feels like the makers just want to finish shooting one page of the script after another.
But fortunately, once the core plot kicks off and the setting is established, A Good Girl’s.. takes off and becomes quite engaging. Having a novel as its base material helps: the characters, headlined by a Dora-like Pip Fitz-Amobi (Emma Myers), quickly come alive, the motives are neatly defined, and the whole ‘plot’ is well-designed, without which a murder mystery can come crumbling down even if other aspects are done well. To its credit, A Good Girl’s.. consistently stays true to the world and atmosphere that it sets up. It also helps that the casting is bang on. Not only do the actors look their part; in an unnecessary but delightful touch, even siblings and family members look like they are actually related to each other.
