Horowitz’s latest whodunnit feels like Agatha Christie lost in the jungle — a sleek, sharply plotted puzzle where everyone’s a suspect and the danger looks just a little too beautiful to be real. It’s escapist TV done properly: smart, pacey, and satisfying.
Anthony Horowitz tells a detailed story with well-drawn characters. He also allows enough time for those characters’ stories to unfold. It’s the case in his brilliant murder mysteries like Mayflower Murders and Magpie Murders. It’s the same when he’s writing for TV. There’s pace. He makes exposition interesting to watch.
A plane crashes in the Mexican jungle. Everyone survives. The pilot is injured. Everyone gets to know each other. Then each one starts getting picked off. There’s a slimy swamp everyone would do best to avoid. There are mountains to climb, high-altitude weather patterns to contend with, and no 5G. A grim twist tickles. Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue is a great whodunnit that makes me invest but doesn’t make me wriggle.
The ensemble cast provide a measured performance in the first two episodes. Eric McCormack is a surprisingly good Kevin Anderson – slippery, unreliable, and awkward. Siobhán McSweeney’s Lisa Davis is a handful of fascinating contradictions. Her on-screen husband Travis Davis, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, appears first as an oafish redneck, but their easy on-screen chemistry later develops a solid connection that makes their doomed ending unexpectedly touching.
Visually, there’s a White Lotus feel in what is a well-executed studio-bound production. The colours give this a sophisticated heightened comic book vibe whilst never straying too far from reality. The sub-plot scenes have a video-game look with saturated colours, dramatic lighting and rendered textures. Production designer Alejandro Fernández (Black Mirror, Westworld) distills Horowitz’s clarity of voice into a world that feels plausible and relatable, even if the setting is far removed from anything its viewers might experience. Little wonder it all feels so joined up. The production company behind this for Amazon MGM, is Eleventh Hour Films, founded by Horowitz’s wife Jill Green, who is among the executive producers on the series.
This combined with Horowitz’s style of peril, jeopardy, and mystery makes this a highly engaging but never affecting watch. All very Agatha Christie on a gloomy Boxing Day afternoon — a piece of escapist entertainment pitched perfectly for the present day minus any self-knowing references to the present day. With everyone sat around in a jungle clearing coming to terms with the post-crash priority, this is the kind of I’m a Celebrity I’d commit to in the future.
Well-drawn, character-driven entertainment. Very theatrical (just don’t pay too much attention to the cheap CGI in the final scenes). Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue is the perfect series to save for Christmas. Or even a request to Santa for Horowitz’s back catalogue of page turners.
