A Murder Between Friends review – Joan Collins’s detective diva sparkles in trashy whodunnit

Hot tubs and high camp as a TV star dripping in rhinestones tries to solve a real-life crime in this fabulously flawed murder mystery. Who cares who did it

H ere is a camply craptastic murder mystery that aims to offer queer-minded fans of trashy detection stories a treat for Pride month with a manifestly cheap and cheerful, amusingly badly performed, diva-centric exercise. Let us be clear: this is not well-made in the slightest, with a script as shonky as a flatpack gateleg table, with similarly slapdash direction by collaborators Trent Garrett and Jacob Young. (Clearly it takes two people to make something this inept.) But its flaws somehow make it endearing, mostly because it stars Joan Collins , looking insanely fabulous at whatever free bus-pass-qualifying age she is.

Collins plays Francesca Carlyle, a famous TV detective lady, lacquered in rhinestones, and always in faintly softer focus than everyone else. She rents her mansion to a gang of old friends getting together for a European holiday in an indeterminate country; this early-middle-aged gaggle, who supposedly have known each other since university, is comprised of a mix of Americans such as bullish Josh (Young), his vampy, fake-eyelash-wearing wife Kat (Nadia Bjorlin), and slightly more modestly attired Sonia (India Thain). There are Brits like Sonia’s husband Devin (Simon Cotton), and newcomer Sydney (Toby-Alexander Smith) who just married the core group’s friend, ambiguously accented Louisa (Hana Vagnerová). One of the cohort is killed on the first night after some carousing, during which two of the above blokes grope each other on a stairway, overseen by a third, and hot tubs are deployed.

Francesca is called upon to solve the murder, of course, although in the end her reputed deductive skills are completely beside the point because one member of the group had planted a bunch of hidden cameras that recorded everything. In similarly convention-defying fashion, motives are revealed at the very last minute along with other details, which really undermines the whole point of a good murder mystery; clues should be there all along so that the viewer can try to work out whodunnit alongside the detective. One gets the feeling that no one involved here really cared about any of that and just wanted to get the damn thing made and hang out with Collins – and really who could blame them on that last point.