Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears

This is the kind of oddity – deceptive title and all – that used to show up in the final hours of all-night marathons at Southern drive-ins. Today, we get Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears playing Atlanta in the hope that someone here has seen the popular Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries TV series from Australia. Essie Davis has been playing the brash flapper since 2012, building up a fanbase willing to scrape together an $8 million budget for a big-screen adventure. That’s enough to get Phryne Fisher out of 1920s Melbourne so she can run around London and the Middle East. She’s mainly looking for a treasure here, but there are plenty of other plot points to keep the production from feeling like a padded one-hour episode. Crypt could have probably even thrived with an ad campaign pushing the movie as a reasonably close relation to Murder on the Orient Express and Knives Out. The aristocratic detective (born as a mere commoner) also gets room to show off a strong similarity to Roger Moore’s 007. More importantly, this Miss Fisher mystery gets to sneak into the cinema as a baggage-free celebration of fine feminism. Hopefully, someone in Hollywood is taking notes for a similar franchise that could make an Indiana Jones out of Amelia Earhart.

[NR]