If you ever go wandering through this blog and find some of my early posts about film adaptations of Agatha Christie’s work, you find yourself in the presence of a staunch purist. I mean, when your favorite author’s greatest strength is her plotting, why tamper with perfection?

Why indeed?

My relationship with adaptation has changed drastically since I erected this monument to classic crime eight and a half years ago. Through dint of experience and maturity, I have allowed my mind to open up to new forms of expression. Part of this has to do with the reactions I have come across on social media. Look, I get it: Christie created some remarkable stuff, and nearly fifty years after her death, she still excites great passion in her fanbase. And certainly some people have screwed it up when they tried to adapt her work. One need only look at Appointment with Death on Suchet’s Poirot or Innocent Lies, an abominable 1995 thriller loosely based on Towards Zero, or The Sittaford Mystery on Agatha Christie’s Marple. Maybe the intentions were good, but the end result was a mess!

Nowadays, however, I balk at those who demand that every adaptation of Christie must be a page-by-page reenactment of her books. That’s not how adaptation works. I looked up the word. At first glance it wasn’t very helpful: “a movie, television or stage play that has been adapted from a written work . . . “ This tells us nothing. So we turn to the subject that I managed to dodge in high school – biology – and we get a clearer picture: “a change or the process of change by which an organism or species becomes better suited to its environment.” 

Soooo much to unpack there! By its very nature, adaptation requires some form of change. And that process of change is necessary because we have changed the environment in which Christie’s story is presented: we have changed the format of delivery from the written word to the visual; we have added other creators (script writers, directors, design artists, actors and so on); and we are presenting to an audience in a different time period and, perhaps, even a different culture. And by culture, I can refer to something as simple as the changes that technology has wrought in the world. In 1984, when I sat down to watch The Body in the Library starring Joan Hickson – all two hundred thirty-six minutes of it – I was enthralled by its fidelity to the text and by its look and tone. I still think Hickson’s series got Miss Marple right better than any other example we’ve seen so far, but I also acknowledge that, in these days of smart phones and short attention spans, the Hickson series feels remarkably slow. Even to me, folks! Alas, I own a smart phone, too!!!

Culture also refers to the way that artists in other countries view Christie through their own sociological lens. And here is where we get some of the most fascinating re-interpretations of the author. A few of them are more faithful to the text than anything we’ve seen in English, like Desyat’ Negrityat, the 1987 Russian version of And Then There Were None. But then there’s 1965’s Gumnaam (Unknown), where India gave the same novel a Bollywood spin. Or what about the two-part adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express shown on Japanese television in 2015? The first part was a faithful adaptation of the story, although this train was bound from Shimonoseki to Tokyo; Part Two was an origin story about how the plan to murder Mr. Ratchett was conceived. 

And, of course, we can’t forget the French TV series, Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie. Back in 2016, I gave this one a hard time, and now I feel pretty bad about that. I didn’t understand how, first and foremost, the show could take all these Poirot and Miss Marple novels and then drop Poirot and Miss Marple and replace them with characters who were tres Française! But this, it turns out, is a common practice when other countries adapt Christie. The Chinese adaptation of Orient Express replaced Poirot with a disgraced lawyer named Si Tu Yan, while the very recent Indian series Charlie Chopra created an original sleuth to solve what I’m told is the most faithful adaptation of The Sittaford Mystery to be produced around the world so far!

I have come to appreciate what adaptations do and how they can deepen our relationship to the original work. (That is assuming that we have a relationship to Christie’s text! I still harbor deep suspicion regarding Christie “fans” who have never actually read her work!) Sometimes, by taking elements of Agatha’s plots and reworking or extending or reimagining or recontextualizing them, one can actually find something new to enjoy or, at least, appreciate the original stories. Thus, after spending all of 2023 in a deep contemplation of the twelve Miss Marple novels, I was excited to turn to South Korea, where in 2018, a series called Ms. Ma, Nemesis premiered. In order to watch this, I had to subscribe to yet another streaming platform: Kocowa shows South Korean content. I’ve tried to cram my viewing into my one-week free trial, but if I can’t get out of my “contract,” you just might see more reviews of South Korean mystery series here!!! 

I have limited exposure to South Korean film and television, but there is no doubt that some exciting art is being created there. Look at the work of Bong Joon-Hoo (Parasite, Snowpiercer, The Host), Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden) or the Netflix series Squid Game. From what I can tell, South Korean filmmakers are not afraid to go to dark places. Films can have a complex tone, mixing stark tragedy with goofy humor, classic melodrama with pop culture. 

All of that is on display in Ms. Ma, Nemesis. Developed by Hong Chang-wook and writer Park Jin-woo, the overarching tale is fairly standard but deliciously action-packed. A child is kidnapped and murdered, and suspicion quickly falls on the victim’s own mother, the wealthy daughter of a dead business tycoon. The distraught woman falls apart under questioning and is committed to a prison for the criminally insane. Nine years later, she makes a daring escape and vows to find and exact revenge upon her daughter’s true killer. She moves to a small town and assumes an alias, trying to fit in as she searches for a mysterious woman who might have witnessed the actual murder. Meanwhile, an obsessed cop is determined to recapture the escaped prisoner, and at the same time the true killer closes in, determined to silence our heroine forever. 

Sounds just like Murder at the Vicarage, right?

What we have here at first seems to be a tidy little revenge thriller/murder mystery, reminiscent of a classic 60’s TV show called The Fugitive, the one where Dr. Richard Kimble, accused of the murder of his wife, escapes the clutches of Lieutenant Gerard and searches for the one-armed man he believes is the true killer! But what Hong Chang-wook and Park Jin-hoo have done here is to infuse their central story with numerous elements from the canon of Miss Marple novels, plus some extra Christie tropes for good measure. Purists may get into a huff, but the end result should fascinate any Christie fan!

Let’s start with the title: Ms. Ma, Nemesis. Of course, Nemesis is the climactic Miss Marple adventure where she follows a loose trail in search of justice at the behest of her late acquaintance, Jason Rafiel. Along the way, we learn that Mr. Rafiel’s son Michael was convicted of murdering his fiancée Verity, and by the end, Miss Marple has secured Michael’s release by finding the real killer. In this case, as always, Miss Marple functions as an outsider, just like nearly all Golden Age detectives did. She is helping a late friend, but she has no personal stake invested in this. She seeks the truth because that is the right thing to do. 

The woman at the center of the series takes on the role of both Miss Marple and Michael Rafiel: she is the one accused, and after her escape she becomes the one seeking justice. But because she is not an outsider and the victim was her own little girl, this woman is seeking vengeance pure and simple. That ramps up the emotional level of a story that, in Christie’s version, was already rife with feeling. There are a couple of other details of the big story that echo Nemesis, especially when it comes to the victim – but I won’t spoil that here. 

After her escape, the woman decides to search for the witness she came upon in the woods on the night she tried to deliver the ransom for her daughter. Her research leads her to a charming little town called Rainbow Village where she believes the witness has been in hiding for all these years. She decides to assume a fake identity and happens to learn that she bears an identical resemblance to a famous mystery author named Ma Ji-won – or Ms. Ma! To play both these characters, the producers cast one of the country’s most popular actresses, Yunjin Kim, who has an international recognition factor for having appeared for seven seasons on Lost as Korean castaway Sun. She is truly stunning in both roles, creating totally different personalities with a switch in her walk or a twist of the lip. Ms. Kim was alo forty-five years old at the time the series was made – about thirty years too young to play Joan Hickson-as-Miss-Marple. Some will immediately see this as a terrible mistake and dismiss the series. We “cup half full” people will instead look at it as an opportunity to wonder how on earth the Miss Marple novels are going to be translated with this actress in a true South Korean style. 

Now ensconced in Rainbow Village as the famous Ms. Ma, our heroine sets up house, knits profusely and, perhaps in order to insinuate herself into community and find her witness, begins to solve little problems that disturb the rather smug lives of the town’s citizens. She finds out why little Choi Woo-joon, the son of the town lawyer, keeps losing his schoolbag. She solves the mystery of who stole the credit card out of the purse of Ms. Hong, the librarian. As a result, she starts to make friends with Ms. Hong and with Woo-joon’s mom, Ms. Park, and shows herself to be a woman of remarkable insight and sensitivity. 

And then, with the arrival of a series of disturbing anonymous letters, the problems escalate. This takes on the form of a series of murder mysteries, which approximate the plots of four Miss Marple novels: The Moving Finger, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, A Murder Is Announced and The Body in the Library. Each case demonstrates Ms. Ma’s remarkable acumen, particularly in comparison with the utterly clownish Police Chief Jo. Even he comes to appreciate and depend upon Ms. Ma as she proves her skill again and again. At the same time, elements of each case have a strong effect on the overall mystery. Perhaps Ms. Ma meets a person who becomes central to both cases at hand. Perhaps she makes a new friend. Perhaps she learns a lesson from solving a mystery that applies to her own situation. And throughout her crime-solving spree, she must always be looking over her shoulder as both the Javert-like Inspector Han and the real killer look for ways to trap her. 

The arrival of disturbing anonymous letters to the villagers signals the first of Ms. Ma’s cases to come: The Moving Finger. Only a few episodes are devoted to this mystery, but because it involves people that Ms. Ma has come to know and like, it has a similar emotional resonance to Jerry Burton’s involvement in the novel. And while there is no Megan Hunter character here (she’s living in America!), the attorney’s little boy Woo-joon becomes pivotal to the series’ overall plot. As the case wraps up, it is replaced with The Mirror Crack’d, which is clearly the crown jewel of adapted material here. Over a quarter of the entire series is given over to the book, giving us the best example of how another artist or culture can adapt a novel and find new things to look at. When I analyzed this novel last year, I admittedly found some weaknesses, particularly in the way Christie went about disguising the central plot with red herrings. Most of the secondary characters make the briefest of appearances in the novel and are suspects in name only. 

As it happens, I recently listened to a discussion about adapting this novel where the speaker complained that most of the film versions of Mirror Crack’d give short shrift to the character of Margot Bence, a society photographer who turns out to have been the adopted daughter whom Marina Gregg abandoned when she became pregnant. But Christie herself does poorly by both Margot and the entire subplot of Marina’s adoption misadventures. A brief mention is made of a fellow adoptee, a brother for Margot, and we are back in “who is Pip?” territory – but it’s not developed at all. The same holds true for Lola Brewster and Ardwick Fenn, who may be suspects but can hardly be considered murderers, given how little time we spend with them. That’s not the way Christie works. 

Back to Ms. Ma: with four or five hours of screen time devoted to the Mirror Crack’d plot, the series has time to look more deeply at all these characters. Margot, Lola and Ardwick, in their South Korean incarnations, become richer, more intriguing characters. So do these versions of Jason Rudd and Ella Zielinsky. As for Lee Jung-Hee, the famous actress making a comeback (ironically, in a film entitled Innocence), not only is she a great interpretation of Marina, but she also happens to be the witness to the killing of “Ms. Ma’s” daughter Min-seo and is critical to the central plot. Thus, Ms. Ma’s closing in on the actress as a witness is a good thing, but closing in on her as a suspect complicates the story entirely!

The pivotal scene at the reception where the “look of doom” comes upon Ms. Lee is beautifully designed and staged. When another woman is poisoned – a woman quite different in personality and relationship from Heather Badcock in the novel – the actress comes under immediate suspicion. (Why does nobody ever suspect Marina in Christie’s book??) Subsequent plot points from the book play out, although the story becomes more elaborate and a key change is made in one aspect of the solution. The story wraps up dramatically, giving Lee the grand death scene that Marina was robbed of in the book. 

Again, we’re not looking at perfect fidelity to the text, but it’s one of the richest adaptations of The Mirror Crack’d that I’ve seen, far more lively than, say, the Angela Lansbury film. 

This case sets us up for more of the same, but the two mysteries that follow are severely truncated to allow for deeper focus on the main story. The best that can be said about this version of A Murder Is Announced, aside from the presence of classic clues from the novel (name mix-ups, the frayed lamp, the dying flowers, the PEARLS!!!), is that the real Ms. Ma shows up, and Yunjin Kim has a blast diving into twin madness! As for The Body in the Library, it plays out so quickly that the case is almost beside the point. What matters is that an important aspect of the solution (the same here as in the novel) allows Ms. Ma to accept a truth about her own situation that she was loath to admit. 

The final episodes wrap up the story of Min-seo’s murder in spectacular fashion, and the solution utilizes one of Christie’s favorite tropes. Perhaps I was ahead of the game as most of the twists cropped up, but it made for highly satisfactory watching, thanks to a great cast and all these little Christie Easter eggs that popped up, like the existence of a shadowy corporation known as Bertram International, or the fact that Ms. Ma’s novels were actually written by Christie herself! 

Mention must be made of the supporting cast: Ko Sung-hee as Eun-ji, a young woman with an agenda of her own who arrives in the village pretending to be Ms. Ma’s niece; a hot young pop singer named CNU playing hot young Deputy Bae, the only cop with brains in Rainbow Village who has a thing for Eun-ji; Choi- Kwang-je as a former gangster named Ko Mal-koo, who becomes an important ally to Ms. Ma; Kim Young-a as the cruel Chief Prosecutor; and Jung Woong-in as the tormented Inspector Han. I also loved all the actresses who played the posse of Rainbow Village women who substituted for Ms. Weatherby, Mrs. Price-Ridley and Miss Hartnell, Miss Marple’s partners in gossip and crime.

In the end, I think the most touching thing about Ms. Ma, Nemesis is the obvious affection and respect the creators have for the timeless character who inspired the series. Sure, plots are scrambled, scraped to bone or used to serve the larger, original story. But when a certain event would happen, like the arrival of an anonymous letter, the announcement of a murder game, or the question surrounding a young victim’s fingernails, I know that this Christie fan got a thrill. And whenever Yunjin Kim slowly laid down her knitting and began to thoughtfully assess the actions of the people around her, it didn’t matter if she was a forty-five year old Korean actress playing a 108-year-old English gentlewoman. 

I recognized that look.