Mention "Grandma" Agatha Christie, friends will not feel strange.
She is a British detective mystery novelist, playwright, the best-selling author in human history, and one of the world's three great masters of speculative literature.
Her more than 80 speculative novels are not only loved by readers from all over the world, such as "Murder on the Orient Express" and "Massacre on the Nile" and other representative works, but also have been put on the big and small screens many times, becoming film and television classics.
In 2015, the 125th anniversary of Grandma's birth, the BBC launched the TV drama version of "No One Survives", which also received numerous praises.
After tasting the sweetness, the BBC announced that it would renew seven film and television adaptations of Grandma's novels, including "Innocence", "Endgame of Death", "ABC Murder" and so on.
And the new drama we want to talk about today is one of them.
It was written by sarah Phelps, the screenwriter of "No One Survives", and co-produced by the BBC and Amazon, "Gray Horse Hotel" (aka "White Horse Hotel").
The story begins in 1960, and the series opens with a thriller and high energy .
A black noblewoman named Delphine went to three witches to divinate for marriage, but not long after returning home, she was electrocuted in the bathroom.
A year later, another hardware shopwoman named Jessie mysteriously died in the street after seeing the same witch.
Before her death, she wrote down a mysterious list, hid it in her shoes, and was not discovered by the forensic officer until the autopsy.
Mark also has a question mark after his name
On this list, with the exception of "Mark Eastbrook" and hardware store owner "Osborne", the remaining eight are difficult to find out who specifically refers to.
Therefore, the police had to start with the existing clues and first called the two people on the list for questioning.
Among them, Mark Eastbrook is the male protagonist of this play.
He is a prominent antique dealer who just lost his beloved wife Delphine (a noblewoman who was electrocuted at the beginning of the film) last year, and now he is married to a young and beautiful Hemia.
Although Mark pretended to be calm on the surface, he was already panicked inside.
Because he found himself not only on the list, but also his godson David, and his secret mistress, Tomacina Tuckerton, who was also among them.
What's worse is that yesterday he had just had a night affair with Tomacina, and this morning when he opened his eyes, he found that the other party had died strangely in bed, which frightened him to escape from the apartment with a rolling belt.
Could it be that the lives of the people on this list are in danger?
Later, at Jessie's house, Mark finds a ticket to the town of Marchetoping. He remembered that his ex-wife Delphine had also taken a ride here before she died.
So he immediately told his godson David about the list.
Just then, Osborne, the hardware store owner, also came to the door. He rummaged through the newspaper obituaries and found that all but the three of them on the list were dead.
Could it be that this incident is related to the legendary witches, who are using witchcraft to collect money to kill people?
Mark arrives at Marche diping, and sure enough, at the Grey Horse Hotel in town, he meets three witches.
After learning Mark's identity, they not only admitted to receiving his ex-wife, but also hinted that the man was also in trouble and should have come to seek help.
And Mark's front foot had just left the town, and the back foot heard two bad news -
First, David's aunt, whose surname was surnamed, died of a heart attack, and then the body of his mistress, Tomacina, was found.
This led Mark to focus his investigation on the witch.
He lied that he was also a loyal customer of the Gray Horse Hotel, and went to find his mistress's stepmother, but he did not expect to set out the inside story of the witch's murder on the spot - it turned out that the stepmother was afraid that Tomacina would compete for the family property, so he went to the witch for help and remitted a large amount of money to the designated account.
Mark then repeated the trick and confronted his godson David. Sure enough, he also tricked him into "buying witches and killing people" to murder his aunt in order to compete for property.
But Mark couldn't figure out who wanted to kill him?
He first thought of his new wife, Hemia, who not only suffered from mania, but also became nervous and overbehaving because he suspected Mark of having an affair.
In addition, he himself hid the secret from the police.
When his ex-wife Delphin returned home from the Grey Horse Hotel that day, she did not reveal the divination of the marriage, but lied about going out shopping.
However, Mark accidentally found the ticket to Marche Diping, suspected that his wife Red Apricot was out of the wall, and angrily overturned the tape recorder next to the bathtub, which caused Delphine to be electrocuted.
Afterwards, in order to cover up the murder, he fled the apartment in a hurry and pretended to be out of the house, so that everyone mistakenly believed that his wife died in an accident.
At present, this two-episode "Grey Horse Hotel" has been updated. Although adapted from Agatha's novel of the same name, the play has been greatly changed from the storyline to the character setting, and the reasoning component has been greatly weakened.
Therefore, a large wave of viewers who rushed to the original work of Grandma to chase the drama have complained that the screenwriter "destroyed the classic", and also made "Gray Horse Hotel" drop to 6.7 points on Douban.
In fact, when it comes to the original "Gray Horse Hotel", this is not the first time it has been used for film adaptation, and in 1997 there was a movie version:
In the classic Detective British drama "Miss Marple", the first episode of the fifth season is also adapted from the story of "The Grey Horse Hotel".
Although these two works, one moved the story background to the contemporary era, and the other changed the detective in the original book to Miss Marple, the overall plot and reasoning process are more respectful of the original work, so it has been generally recognized by fans of the original work.
The drama version of "Grey Horse Hotel" shared today, although the changes are larger, resulting in a large reputation is not as good as before, but for ordinary audiences, it is still a mini British drama worth watching.
On the one hand, as a suspense drama, its thriller atmosphere is rendered in place, the photography composition is exquisite, and it maintains the BBC production standard as always.
For example, in the first episode, the director uses montage editing and the male protagonist's perspective to bring rhythm, locking the focus of the case on the Gray Horse Hotel and the witch, so that the audience mistakenly believes that it is really a witchcraft killing.
On the other hand, by incorporating family ethics elements, it makes the story more intricate, and also adds points of view and depth to the subsequent puzzle solving.
The male protagonist in the play has long objectified women in marriage, and while raising his mistress outside, he has killed his ex-wife by mistake because of jealousy and suspiciousness. The plot of using his wife as a nanny after the new marriage and continuing to cheat is easily reminiscent of "Deadly Woman".
Both stories also take place in the 1960s
Because he had done too much in his heart, Mark always dreamed of returning to the crime scene in the middle of the night, and was once frightened by nightmares. Now he is worried about being convicted by the police, and he is afraid of retaliation by his new wife, which is also self-inflicted.
In order to protect himself, Mark rushed to the Gray Horse Hotel with money overnight, hoping to use the power of the witch to eliminate these two hidden dangers.
It didn't take long for Hemiya to actually fall ill and fall unconscious, and the policeman bled to death.
Just when Mark felt that the whole thing was too mysterious to do, he suddenly discovered a suspicious point: long before his mistress's body was found by the police, Osborne had said that he had slipped out of his mouth to mention her death.
After infiltrating the hardware store, Mark finally uncovers the entire horrific conspiracy – it turns out that Osborne is the mastermind behind clearing the "obstacles" for the rich by writing letters to them.
In the letter, he pretended to be a witch of the Gray Horse Hotel and asked each customer to tell the fortune to ask for their needs; on the other hand, he asked Jessie to go to the hotel regularly to collect information, poison and kill people with colorless and odorless thallium, and then let the customer pay the reward into the designated account.
It wasn't until the witch gradually became aware of the truth and Jessie wanted to turn herself in because of her uneasy conscience, that Osborne poisoned her.
Unexpectedly, before her death, Jessie wrote down the list of assassinations informed by the witch, and mistakenly included Delphine's husband, the male protagonist Mark, forcing Osborne to use him to mislead the investigation.
After the plot was uncovered, Osborne, far from repenting, threatened to poison Mark again. The man killed him in a fit of rage, and also set fire to the hardware store and burned all the evidence of the crime to ashes.
Intriguingly, the episode leaves an open-ended ending —
When Mark finally returns home alone, he not only dreams of killing his wife again, but also sees the news of his death in the newspaper...
It doesn't really matter whether this means that Mark has already died of thallium poisoning, or whether he has completely reincarnated from the recurrence of his old illness, or whether he has fallen into an eternal cycle of time because of his sins.
As Osborne said before he died, "One day I can solve you, but you have no way of knowing when, every time you put anything in your mouth, you wonder if I poisoned you until you starved yourself to death..."
Sinners will eventually go to hell, and this dramatic ending tells us once again that the most terrifying thing, whether in magical reality or film and television, is often not fatal witchcraft or disease, but greed and distortion of human nature.