'Ceci N'est Pas Un Crime': A Witty and Surrealist Whodunit for the Ages
Set against a 1930s English estate filled with surrealist artists, This Is Not a Murder Mystery is a locked-room thriller that asks whether you can solve a crime when the evidence is designed to deceive you.
By Abigail Marchetti
W
e can all agree that the most creative and compelling part of any murder mystery drama is the murders themselves. And this reimagined thriller is no different.
The backdrop of a sprawling 1930s well-to-do English estate, West Dean serves as the conclave; grand enough to contain secrets, isolated enough to make escape impossible, and dressed from floor to ceiling, in the kind of beauty that makes you forget to be suspicious. There is something quietly indecent about calling a show ‘This Is Not a Murder Mystery’ and then, with considerable elegance, beginning with a corpse. But that is precisely the point. The denial is not evasion, rather it is an invitation. The first course has been served.
Magritte, who happens to be one of the guests, once painted a pipe beneath the words ‘Ceci n'est pas une pipe’- this is not a pipe. The painting is, of course, a pipe. What he meant was that the image of a thing and the thing itself are not the same, that representation is always a kind of lie, and that looking carefully does not necessarily mean seeing clearly. The show has borrowed his logic wholesale. It announces what it is not, and in doing so becomes the most complete murder mystery imaginable, part surrealist parlour game, part locked-room puzzle, and entirely too elegant to be trusted. What follows is the delightful inconvenience of a corpse in very artistic company.
It is 1936, and surrealism is at the height of its notoriety. The movement has graduated from provocation to phenomenon, outside the walled garden, something is shifting — Hitler gaining traction. This world these artists have built, both strange and beautiful, feel altogether precarious. Sensing this freedom has an expiry date, they naturally do what all artists do when history begins to close in; they throw a party.
The guests have not yet anticipated the full weight of their own legacies. They are free, unburdened, and thoroughly theatrical; performing for each other as much as for any audience. In a house full of people professionally committed to the blurring of reality, it becomes very difficult to tell sincerity from performance, or jealousy from admiration. The estate indulges them entirely with oyster stands gleaming under soft lighting, Schiaparelli gowns move through candlelit rooms. The walls have ears, and the décor has intentions. It is a gloriously designed trap.
The first body is found, her head wrapped in cloth, posed precisely, without apparent haste, in the manner of Magritte's ‘The Lovers.’ In the painting, two figures attempt to kiss through the fabric that shrouds their faces, intimacy frustrated by obstruction, connection made impossible by the very thing that should allow it. Lifted from the canvas and placed in a country house corridor, the image is no longer still. It is no longer safe. A painting that once asked questions about desire and distance has become evidence, and Magritte, standing in the hallway of the estate where he is a guest, is looking at a version of his own work that he did not make but cannot deny.
This is the show's central and most unsettling proposition. The killer is not using art as backdrop or alibi, rather making art. Each subsequent death confirms it; Nash is arranged in the form of a crucifix, the posture lifted directly from Dalí's sketches; another body is found punctured by nails, a recreation of Man Ray's ‘The Gift’ an iron with tacks along its sole, an object of domestic utility rendered monstrous by a single addition. “The killer creates images,” Magritte observes, with the particular unease of a man who recognises the grammar. Each crime pays homage to its artist. Each scene is composed with the care of someone who has studied the work closely, perhaps too closely.
Which raises the question: is the killer a devoted admirer, a hostile critic, or something more intimate still, a rival, working in the only medium left available to them? The answer, typically, is not straightforward. But the question reframes everything. To solve these murders, the detective must be able to read the image. And these are images built by people who spent their careers ensuring that images resist exactly that; who believe that what you see is never simply what is there. The surrealists made work designed to destabilise perception, to locate the uncanny inside the ordinary, to make the familiar strange. The striking visual set-pieces that make the show such a pleasure to watch, are not incidental to the argument, with every tableau a clue written in a language that the genre's usual tools cannot analyse.
The locked-room mystery is, at its core, an act of faith in the visible. The premise is simple, the visible is evidence, observation leads to truth, and truth, eventually, leads to a culprit. It is a profoundly rationalist form, which makes it a peculiar choice of vessel for a group of artists who built their entire careers on the premise that the visible is the last thing you should trust. Suspicion hides, here, under the guise of beauty. The fragile egos and theatrical desires of the guests, their rivalries, their entanglements, their compulsive need to be seen, function simultaneously as character detail and as misdirection. A glamorously dressed lie is still a lie. But when the décor is this deliberate, when every object has been placed and every gesture carries the possibility of meaning, the line between what is real and what is performed becomes dangerously difficult to locate. Beauty is not harmless. This parlour game is also a trap. And these artists, who spent their careers making the ordinary strange, are now living inside their own box of tricks, with the uncomfortable realisation that someone else has learned how to use it.
The final scene does not offer a solution so much as an image. Which is, of course, exactly right. Surrealism was never interested in answers, only in the space between things, the veil between the visible and the unknowable, the moment before clarity. Art, the show ultimately proposes, is that veil; an attempt to capture something that exists between worlds, between the waking and the dreaming, between the living and the dead. The killer created images. So did the artists. The difference, in the end, is smaller than anyone at West Dean would care to admit.
This is Not a Murder Mystery is essential viewing for anyone drawn to stylish surrealism, the satisfactions of a locked-room puzzle, or television willing to treat aesthetics as something more than decoration. It is a show that trusts you to look, but what you see, as Magritte always warned us, is entirely your problem.
All six episodes of 'Ceci N’est Pas Un Crime' are available to stream now on Channel 4.
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