For years, Agatha Christie’s darkest puzzle had not quite landed on screen. Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot films were said to miss the harsher edge of some of her novels, but the 2015 miniseries And Then They Were None, starring Sam Neill, was widely seen as the first screen version to truly capture the book’s grim tone.
The 3-part adaptation of Christie’s 1939 novel begins on Soldier Island, where eight people who do not know each other arrive at a remote lavish mansion and find their host missing. After dinner, a chilling gramophone recording accuses each of the island’s inhabitants of murder, and the story tightens as the guests are picked off one by one while they try to identify their tormentor or find a way off the island.
Neill appeared alongside Charles Dance, Toby Stephens, Burn Gorman and Douglas Booth in a production that gave the mystery a severity older adaptations had not fully matched. That mattered because And Then They Were None is not only Christie’s bestselling book ever, but also the one she singled out as the hardest to write, saying there was no heroic detective, amateur or professional, to solve the killings. The absence of that guiding figure is exactly what gives the story its power: no one is arriving to restore order, and no one is safe long enough to do it.
There had been four earlier English-language films based on the novel before the 2015 miniseries, but the television version arrived with a different purpose. It did not soften the story into a conventional mystery. It leaned into the novel’s bleakness, which is why viewers and critics alike treated it as a rare case of Christie on screen feeling closer to the book than to a brand.
That shift helped explain why the adaptation still stands out when turned back to Christie in 2018 with The ABC Murders, a Poirot story from 1936 starring John Malkovich and Rupert Grint, with Sarah Phelps again writing the script. Phelps had already shown she could take the familiar mechanics of a Christie plot and push them toward something colder and less comforting. In 2015, that approach gave Sam Neill’s version of And Then They Were None a brutal clarity that earlier attempts had lacked.
The story’s influence has stretched well beyond prestige television, shaping horror films including Bay of Blood and the original Friday the 13th. That reach is a reminder that Christie’s island thriller was never just another whodunit. It was a template for dread, and the 2015 miniseries was the adaptation that finally treated it that way.
