Teresa Reviews Ms. Ma: Nemesis I (2018)

Teresa reviews Ms. Ma: Nemesis I (2018) and was drawn into the story of an accused child murderer escaping an asylum to clear her name.

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Agatha adjacent: 4 guns

If you’re paying attention, you’ll recognize many classic tropes from Agatha’s writing.

Quality of episodes: 4 guns

We were sucked in at once, despite the language and cultural barriers.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

Ms. Ma: Nemesis tells you in the title which Agatha novel they’re adapting into something strange and new. They’ll also riff off The Moving Finger, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, A Murder Is Announced, and The Body in the Library. It’s a 32-part telenovela, that fascinating format American TV does so poorly: a lengthy TV series allowing a complete story to unfold naturally rather than cramming it into a miniseries, boiling it down to two hours, or insisting (to maximize earnings) on running the story into the ground until viewers quit in disgust and the story never achieves its logical yet unexpected and surprising climax.

It seems set up to be watched in 4-episode blocks. Only the fourth episode ended in real credits. So that’s how we’ll watch it. I don’t know how the story will progress; I’ll learn it over weeks as we watch four episodes at a time. But I can speculate with the best of them! Let’s begin with the dramatic set up and the title for Ms. Ma.

We open with police cars rushing to the high-security asylum where the dangerous crazies are housed. In Ms. Ma’s case (no one says her name), she’s there because she murdered her young daughter, bashing the girl’s head in with a stone in a rainy clearing in the woods. The case looked cut and dried. She’s convicted, her husband divorced her, and she’s locked away for the good of society.

But nine years after being locked up, she escapes the high-security asylum and disappears. Chief Inspector Han was the young officer investigating the case. He worked closely with Prosecutor Yang Mi-Hee to ensure the case was properly investigated and prosecuted. Now, as he learns new details while investigating Ms. Ma’s escape, he wants to reopen the case. Prosecutor Yang does not.

What does this have to do with Agatha and Nemesis? Nemesis, at its heart, is a novel about love curdling into possessiveness. Remember, every virtue taken to its extreme becomes a vice and love is no exception.

In the novel, Clotilde Bradbury-Scott is the foster mother of Verity Hunt, who came to live with Clotilde and her sisters as a young girl. But when Verity grew up, as children do, and fell in love with Michael Rafiel, Clotilde could not tolerate the idea of Verity leaving her to enjoy a life and family of her own. She murdered her adored foster daughter and buried her body under the ruined greenhouse, veiled by flowering polygonum. To cover her tracks, she murdered another local girl about Verity’s age named Nora, and framed Michael for the murder. Clotilde smashed in Nora’s face and identified her as Verity. The police trusted her identification because they had no reason to disbelieve a grieving old lady who was a pillar in the local community.

Later, to cover up her murders, Clotilde murdered another woman. Because she couldn’t keep Verity forever at her side, Clotilde destroyed lives.

Michael Rafiel’s father, decades after the event, asks Miss Marple to investigate and discover the truth of who murdered Verity Hunt.

If you’re keeping up with current Hollywood adaptations, you’ll notice that plot lurks in the heart of Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Hallowe’en Party (2023).

The question you’ll have watching the opening four episodes is which role does Ms. Ma take? Did she murder her daughter so her daughter couldn’t choose to remain with her ex-husband and leave her alone and bereft? That is, is she Clotilde? Prosecuting attorney Yang makes a very good case for her furious insanity. So does Ms. Ma, in a tearful phone call to her former husband after she escapes when she apologizes profusely for being a vicious harridan and terrible wife from hell. When you watch the scene of the murder and testimony from witnesses at the time, she sure looks guilty, trying to punish her ex by murdering their daughter. And where’d that suitcase full of money conveniently tucked away come from? When she escapes, Ms. Ma heads right for the woods to retrieve the money and then disappears into a quaint, upscale town called Rainbow Village. You’d think she planned it all in advance.

Or is Ms. Ma taking the role of Miss Marple? When she resurfaces months later in Rainbow Village, disguised as a mystery novelist, she settles into town and begins solving small questions like missing backpacks. A flashback tells us why. While escaping the asylum, she spots a Bible verse:

Let Justice roll down like waters,
And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
Amos 5:24

She takes it to heart. We see her solve the case of Mrs. Hong’s stolen credit card. Ms. Ma realizes that it wasn’t the gardening thug who took it. It was Mrs. Hong’s daughter, angry at her father’s affair. An affair that Mrs. Hong knew nothing about but Ms. Ma did.

As episode four ends, you see the first hints of the other novels that will be adapted. It looks like, as with Checkmate (2022), Agatha’s stories will be woven into the much larger arc. Ms. Ma and the gardening thug, Ko Mal-Koo, both receive suspiciously accurate anonymous letters. That’s directly from The Moving Finger, except in the novel, the anonymous accusatory letters are oddly nonspecific. As if the letter writer didn’t know the village gossip well enough to be accurate. This letter writer does.

Episode four ends on a substantial cliffhanger, with Detective Han confronting Ms. Ma. But with 28 episodes to go, you know she’ll escape. The only question is how.

At this point, I don’t know if Ms. Ma embodies Miss Marple and will save the villagers from themselves and find her daughter’s murderer. Or, if she did it herself and is covering it up while trying to frame it on someone else.

The key Agatha trope here is the daughter’s bashed-in face. Why would Ms. Ma smash in her daughter’s face unless she was so angry at her husband that she wanted to hurt him even more than merely killing their daughter? Or, did someone else murder Ms. Ma’s daughter, as she claims? But why smash the girl’s face? The reason is to make it harder to identify the body. Was that Ms. Ma’s daughter, Min-Seo? Or was that the body of some other girl who’d disappeared. But because she was dressed in Min-Seo’s school uniform and everything said she was that girl, perhaps the police didn’t check as thoroughly as they should have to confirm the identity of the body. When Nora Broad disappeared in Nemesis, only her family cared because she was a working-class girl who liked good times. The overworked police force assumed she had run off with an unsuitable man. With no body, there was no crime to investigate.

So we’re off to a good start! We don’t know if Ms. Ma is innocent or not, or how she’ll escape her encounter with the police. Let’s find out!