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I watched The Thursday Murder Club on Netflix the other night. It was star-studded – Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan, Celia Imrie, David Tennant, and Tom Ellis, to name a few.
It was entertaining too; there were murders to be solved, plenty of amateur sleuthing, a retirement village full of personalities, and a group of older people who were far more capable than anyone around them initially assumed.
The biggest entertaining gem for me was how the movie portrayed ageing. Because it neither portrayed ageing merely as inevitable physical decline nor disguised ageing with inspirational messages about "staying young and not looking your age".
Instead, The Thursday Murder Club showed something I think we do not see often enough on screen: people who have aged, accumulated experience, lost things, lived through things, and are still curious about the world.
Retirement Does Not Mean You Stop Being Useful
The Thursday Murder Club consists of four retirees who spend their Thursdays looking into unsolved crimes. Joyce is a retired nurse. Elizabeth is a former intelligence operative. Ron was a trade union activist. Ibrahim is a psychiatrist.
Elizabeth understands strategy and how people behave when they are hiding something. Ibrahim understands psychology. Ron knows how to confront people and mobilise others. Joyce understands people in a quieter way. She observes, listens and often gets information precisely because people do not see her as threatening.
Their careers may have ended, but their knowledge did not disappear. I really liked that.
We tend to associate usefulness with employment. Once someone retires, there is almost an assumption that the productive part of life has ended and the remaining years are mainly about leisure, healthcare and grandchildren.
But a person who has spent forty years practising medicine, teaching children, running businesses, solving problems, caring for patients, raising families or managing difficult people does not suddenly lose all that knowledge because they no longer have a job title.
Experience does not expire at retirement.
The Characters Are Old, and That Is the Point
Another thing I appreciated was that the movie did not try to make ageing look youthful. The characters are older, and the story allows them to be older.
They talked about health concerns, grief, illness, and how time is no longer unlimited. But none of those things cancel out curiosity, humour, intelligence or purpose.
There is a common way of praising older people that sounds something like, "She is 75 but still behaves like she is 40!" It sounds complimentary, but underneath it is the assumption that being younger is still the ideal.
The Thursday Murder Club offers a much more interesting possibility:
What if seventy years of living actually makes someone more interesting?
Ageing and becoming less relevant are not the same thing.
Joyce Was Probably My Favourite
I also have to mention Joyce, and not only because we share the same name. Hahaha!
When she first joins the group, she seems like the least intimidating member of the club. She is docile, friendly, and very ordinary when compared to Elizabeth, who appears capable of organising an international espionage operation before breakfast.
But Joyce has her own kind of intelligence. As a former nurse, she understands people. She notices small things, she listens, and because she does not immediately look like the smartest or most dangerous person in the room, people underestimate her.
That actually becomes an advantage.
You know what? There is something very satisfying about watching a character whose strength comes not from being loud, dominant or obviously brilliant, but from decades of paying attention to human beings.
Perhaps This Is What Interested Me Most
Perhaps the most obvious reason for why I immensely enjoyed this movie is that I have become increasingly interested in what happens as we move through midlife and eventually into older age.
There is so much conversation about ageing from a medical perspective. We talk about disease prevention, physical decline, healthcare costs, retirement planning and longevity.
All of those things matter.
But there is another question that interests me just as much:
What happens to identity?
Who are we when the titles start disappearing, and when are we no longer the manager, the doctor, the teacher, the business owner or the person everyone calls when something needs to be solved?
The Thursday Murder Club gives a surprisingly simple answer:
You are still the person who spent decades becoming who you are.
The job may end, but the expertise remains.
Stay curious, stay relevant.
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