The Thursday Murder Club 2025 Parents Guide

The Thursday Murder Club is Rated PG-13 by Motion Picture Rating (MPA) for violent content/bloody images, strong language and some sexual references.

Movie Review – The Thursday Murder Club (2025)

Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club was practically engineered in a lab to become a publishing sensation back in 2020 a genteel murder mystery with a cozy British veneer, tailor-made for book clubs and airport displays. Predictably, it spawned three sequels and, just as predictably, Hollywood has swooped in to wring it dry. Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment has taken the bait, with Chris Columbus (yes, the Home Alone guy) steering the adaptation and Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote wrangling the script. If nothing else, they’ve assembled a cast that could make reading a phone book watchable: Helen Mirren, Celia Imrie, Pierce Brosnan, and Ben Kingsley as silver-haired amateur sleuths who treat homicide like a garden-variety crossword puzzle. The result is as smooth and harmless as a lukewarm cup of tea not exactly thrilling, but palatable enough for the Sunday-afternoon crowd.

Enter Joyce (Celia Imrie), the latest tenant of the swanky Coopers Chase Retirement Village, who’s keen to find companionship while her daughter Joanna (Ingrid Oliver) practices the fine art of benign neglect. A former nurse, Joyce is swiftly folded into the titular club alongside ex-spy Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), blustering ex-union leader Ron (Pierce Brosnan), and refined ex-psychiatrist Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley). Their hobby is solving cold cases, because apparently bridge nights just weren’t stimulating enough. Trouble brews when Ian (David Tennant), one of the village’s money-grubbing owners, decides to cash out by paving paradise and putting up an event center. When his more compassionate partner Tony (Geoff Bell) winds up dead, the retirees dust off their sleuthing skills, with reluctant aid from Donna (Naomi Ackie), a police officer shackled to her dismissive boss (Daniel Mays). For Joyce, it’s a crash course in teamwork. For the rest, it’s an excuse to cosplay as Murder, She Wrote.

The Thursday Murder Club spends its weekly meetings poring over cold-case files, which sounds like a Netflix true-crime binge group until Penny, their co-founder, inconveniently slides into hospice care. Joyce, armed with Victoria sponge and latent medical know-how, slips into the vacancy. The film rattles through character introductions with the efficiency of a casting call: Elizabeth, mysterious and still clutching her spy-craft bag of tricks, balances that with caring for her memory-fading husband (Jonathan Pryce); Ron does his rabble-rousing routine while basking in his son Jason’s (Tom Ellis) reality-TV fame; Ibrahim brings gravitas with a side of smugness; and Joyce just wants someone to talk to. The murder of Tony doubles as both the central mystery and a handy excuse to wring pathos from the future of the posh retirement paradise.

The actual detective work? Serviceable, if you don’t think too hard. Elizabeth gets to break out her James Bond-lite maneuvers, Joyce proves there’s more to her than cake, and Donna is given a much-needed confidence boost courtesy of people old enough to be her grandparents. The script flirts with the usual “aren’t old people funny with technology?” gags (yes, decoding a PDF is presented as a brainteaser), but Columbus seems oddly hesitant to lean into the absurdity, instead treating these characters like seasoned pros. The case eventually expands beyond Coopers Chase, more bodies pile up, and Ibrahim gets his turn to shine with the heavy lifting.

What keeps this confection afloat is charm oceans of it. The cast could do this sort of genteel banter in their sleep, and at times, it feels like they are. The mystery, meanwhile, grows so cluttered it has to resort to clumsy exposition dumps just to untangle itself, leaving a conclusion that lands with more of a shrug than a gasp. Still, between the lively character interplay, the occasional poignant moment, and the promise of more cozy capers on the horizon, it’s easy to see how this series could keep chugging along. Sequels are inevitable, because who doesn’t want to watch Helen Mirren solve another murder over sponge cake?

The Thursday Murder Club 2025 Parents Guide

Violence: Let’s face it this is PG-13: not kiddie fare, but probably survivable for your 13-year-old who thinks gore is just TikTok’s latest trend. We’ve got bodies, blood puddles, and at least one flashback of someone being hurled and stabbed for dramatic effect. A skeleton makes a cameo that might give your kid nightmares, and there’s mention of suicide and assisted suicide off-camera. Not a gore-fest, but enough to prompt an “Uh-oh” from even the most jaded viewer.

Language: Expect a handful of well-placed “f–k,” “s–t,” “pr–k,” and the occasional expletive-laced British mutter. Nothing like an adolescent meltdown, but just enough to remind you that these octogenarians still know their way around an insult.

Sexual Content: no wrinkle-filled nudity or geri-sex scenes here. Instead, we get cheeky references and eyebrow-raising quips (“good with their hands”), subtle enough to make you smirk but not enough to raise your juice meter. A sprinkle of sly flirting funny, not scandalous.

Substance Use / Drugs: Wine, gin, beer they sip gracefully, not pass out on the bar. No haze of inebriation or legal substances of the hardcore variety. Just the refined sort of mild indulgence you’d expect from people who’ve earned their retirement and their sarcasm.

Final Verdict: This film knows what it is: a genteel whodunit with more wit than punch. Not perfect, but it’s got charm and enough mischief to keep teens awake post-bedtime. If you want something clean enough for dinnertime viewing but spiked with parental-approval risk, this fits the bill.

Director: Chris Columbus
Writers: Katy Brand, Richard Osman
Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, David Tennant, Ben Kingsley, Jonathan Pryce, Richard E. Grant
Producer: Chris Columbus

Release date: August 28, 2025 (United States)