Teresa Reviews Until Death Do Us Part (2023)

Teresa reviews Until Death Do Us Part (2023), an original story from the 1970s season of Les Petits Muertres d’Agatha Christie, and thought the scissor-killings cut out a hole in the plot.

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Agatha adjacent? 2½ scissors

She’d do this; have an opportunistic villain piggyback onto someone else’s series of murders. Muddying the waters is a classic idea.

Quality of movie: 3 scissors

Pretty good. It’s laugh out loud funny, but it needed tighter writing to explain what Tristan was up to, the connections between other characters, and how Gréco knew all this.

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

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

One of the hallmarks of Agatha’s writing is that not only can anyone be a victim of murder, anyone can be the murderer. It doesn’t have to be the obvious suspect. She also — an important fact to keep in mind while reading her stories — liked making the obvious suspect the murderer and then cleverly concealing how they did it so that you and the police believe that scissor-stabbed body lying in a pool of blood isn’t the handiwork of the corpse’s spouse.

Never forget: in Christie World as in the real world, the most likely suspect for any murder (assuming a drug deal gone bad isn’t involved) is the victim’s husband, boyfriend, wife, girlfriend, ex, or, rarely, a stalker. Any policeman will confirm this.

Wait. An ex? You bet! Former lovers can be quite vindictive towards their former object of adoration, especially when said object of adoration tossed them aside with all the consideration shown for a used tissue.

The only question is how to get back at them. Shoot that lying bastard dead? Run them over with your car and then, to make sure, back up and run them over again? Very satisfying, hearing the crunch of bones under your tires along with the screaming. But these methods lack subtlety. It also lets local law enforcement know exactly who to arrest.

A clever spurned wife can devise a devious plan, one that will ensure she’ll get to watch her former husband become the main suspect in a serial killing spree, get arrested, and face the guillotine all the while knowing he’s innocent. He’s hopelessly trapped. Does this sound like a story Agatha would tell?

Yes, it does. Recall Towards Zero (1944). The murder of Lady Tressilian took place but not because the murderer hated her.

Nevile Strange needed Lady Tressilian dead because then he’d get to watch his ex-wife, Audrey Strange, get arrested, squirm and panic while the investigation proved shedunnit, and then, sobbing on the gallows, meet the hangman. He’d gloat every step of the way. How dare that woman leave him because she was afraid of him and didn’t want to be his doormat and punching bag anymore?

Let’s reverse the sexes. Denis Marchais married Sarah a decade ago, promising her a happy married life with children. Then he unilaterally decided no kids. She agreed, reluctantly, because she loved him. But he had the morals of a tomcat and after much cheating, divorced her. Now Sarah’s ten years older, she doesn’t have the children she wanted so badly, and her value on the marriage market has declined substantially.

Meanwhile, Denis is free to cat around, even signing up with a matchmaking service. Not because he wants to remarry. No, he’s figured out that lonely, desperate women in their late thirties are happy to provide their favors to this charming man who says all the right things. And after he gets what he wants, he leaves without a backward glance leaving them to wonder what they did wrong. The matchmaking agency lets him enjoy a rotating harem of lovelies without having to provide anything other than a nice dinner. It’s cheap and efficient!

Except that several of his dates have been found dead, with an identical brand of scissors thrust into their carotid arteries. A good pair of dressmakers’ scissors, razor sharp, can be lethal. Afterwards, they’re useless for anything but cutting paper which is why, dear reader, you should mark your good scissors so other members of your household do not touch them when they want to cut open cat food bags or hack cardboard boxes apart or cut blizzards of paper snowflakes. Those scissors are ruined, ruined, I tell you, and only suitable to cut out the heart of the miscreant.

Oh. Sorry. I got sidetracked.

Which is also what happens to Gréco’s investigation. She thinks she knows what’s going on. She doesn’t believe it’s Denis and not just because he enjoyed her favors. She enjoyed his, too, and also doesn’t want someone hanging around and getting underfoot. She’s got Beretta for that, still mooning over his ex-wife who was delighted to move on to better things.

But could it be Tristan? He’s the weird, possibly autistic son of Lisa and François Boissiere, lovebird owners of the matchmaking agency. He’s good with a camera and films interviews with the prospective matches. He’s also a voyeur, discreetly filming all kinds of things, most of them harmless.

But not everything he films is harmless. He learns his father, who taught him not to lie, is lying to mom. Tristan is easily enraged, but is he enraged by his father’s lying? Or enraged at the women who abetted his father’s adultery? He owns a pair of those scissors.

But when Gréco arrests Tristan, rather than see his innocent son get guillotined, François confesses to murder. One murder. Only one. He needed to get rid of a difficult mistress and providence handed him a chance to hide his murder in a group of them, where it would go unremarked as being different. Like The ABC Murders (1936) or, in a callback to a season one episode of Les Petits Muertres, La Plume Empoisonnee from 2009.

But if François murdered only one victim, copying the method so helpfully spelled out to the newspapers by Commissaire Legoff, then who murdered the other women? And how did the murderer do it without a single sign of a struggle? Very few women will hold still while a stranger plunges a sharp pair of scissors into their necks. Yet there’s no sign of a fight. These victims opened the door of their home to their murderer, never suspecting a thing.

Why Denis’ vindictive ex-wife did, using another of Agatha’s classic tropes: no one sees a servant. But Sarah isn’t exactly a servant. She’s the French version of an Avon Lady, knocking on doors to sell cosmetics. She applies them to a client so they can see for themselves how they can be transformed into a beautiful, desirable woman who can find love and marriage with a good man. Maybe even have the family they’ve always dreamed of. No wonder her potential victims let her into their homes. She answered their prayers with foundation, lipstick, rouge, and eyeliner. Her clients really did look their best selves.

And then, when they were joyfully admiring themselves in the mirror, she stabbed them in the neck. No muss, no fuss, no bother. Nothing out of place and no signs of a struggle. It’s the perfect crime.

Until Sarah tries it on Gréco, Denis’ latest paramour.

I don’t have an issue with Gréco stopping her. But how did she know? Beretta and Rose figured it out, pooling their information and racing to her rescue (not that Gréco needed it).

This would have been a better episode with tighter writing. How did she know? You’ll never learn.