A Murder Between Friends (2026) Review: Poor Joan Collins

For a very brief moment in time, I thought I might enjoy A Murder Between Friends. It was clearly terrible, but there was something amusing about how little effort it put into concealing that fact. Joan Collins was there. Candles were burning everywhere. A skeleton in armor was considered a normal prop to have in a mansion’s living area. Perhaps this would be one of those disasters that gets more entertaining as you go along.

Unfortunately, the laughter wore off fast. What began as amused disbelief gradually became a desperate wish for someone to solve the murder, extinguish the candles, and arrange a getaway car for Joan Collins.

Stream, rent, or purchase A Murder Between Friends on Amazon.

Directed by Jacob Young and Trent Garrett, with a screenplay by Mark Rozzano, the film brings six friends to a country estate belonging to Francesca Carlyle (Collins), a celebrated television sleuth. Their vacation turns into a murder investigation when someone’s found dead in a hot tub. Everyone is a suspect, and Francesca is drawn into the task of separating the secrets from the evidence.

It’s a perfectly serviceable setup. Put some unpleasant people in a grand house, give them reasons to distrust one another, and let a glamorous veteran performer preside over the mess. The film was explicitly marketed as a murder comedy, so its silliness can be explained away (in theory). It was even shot on location in the Czech Republic. So, I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

But there were so many distracting elements that pointed me toward a very obvious conclusion: the film was originally intended to be taken seriously, but its mediocrity forced them to change course and label it a “comedy.” Even the filming and mis-en-scene were laughably bad. It was very apparent at times that the filmmakers only had a single camera available for scenes that clearly would have been better suited for a two-camera setup. And that’s just one of the more forgivable examples.

Take the candles. There are so many candles. They sit around burning endlessly in corridors and basements that are rarely visited by anyone. Who was maintaining them? Does anyone ever put them out? And how much wax does this household consume in an average week? The murderer was somewhere on the property, presumably, but I was more concerned about the fire risk.

Ordinarily, this would be a petty complaint. Plenty of films use candles to make an old building look mysterious. Here, however, they became a symptom of the production’s entire approach: keep adding the outward signs of atmosphere and hope suspense eventually materializes.

Then there is the skeleton in armor. I think it only appeared in two scenes, but I kept getting distracted by it, trying to understand how something so conspicuously silly had made it into the final cut. It looks nothing like an object belonging in an estate, but rather something acquired because somebody thought a castle ought to have one. It might as well have come with a little card explaining that the setting is supposed to be spooky.

Compare that with the wooden figure in Oddity, whose mere presence changes the way we watch the surrounding room. An object can organize an entire scene around the possibility of something happening. This skeleton mostly encouraged me to look away in embarrassment.

At first, these distractions were funny. I could enjoy the gap between the grand mystery the film seemed to imagine and the cluttered, awkward thing on screen. Collins’s presence made that gap even stranger. Every time I remembered that Joan Collins was involved, which, sadly, she rarely was, I found myself wanting to send in a rescue team. That reminds me: If you’re coming into this film for Joan Collins alone (why else would you?), you’re going to have a bad time. She only has about 15 minutes or so of actual screen time, despite being the film’s main draw.

There are bad scripts, and then there are scripts that make you wonder whether elder abuse can take screenplay form. Collins is also credited as a producer, which complicates my imaginary rescue operation, but I remained committed to getting her out of there.

My affection for Collins could only carry the film so far, though. I wanted her appearances to revive my interest, or at least provide a little relief from the rest of the ensemble. Instead, I kept becoming more conscious of the distance between the performer and the production around her.

The friends themselves offer little reason to care about the investigation. A group mystery needs relationships that stay interesting throughout. We should be watching how people speak to one another, noticing small humiliations, resentments, or unexpected loyalties. Here, I struggled to care about these people at all.

That makes the twists particularly underwhelming. There are plenty of them, but quantity does very little when the developments are so expected. Rather than making me reconsider an earlier scene, each new disclosure just reconfirmed how poorly the scriptwriter understands the psychology of a mystery. The film repeatedly asks for surprise after giving us way too much time to prepare. Not to mention the fact that, despite location shoots in the Czech Republic, they never even take advantage of their beautiful surroundings! They might as well have shot the entire thing on a studio lot in New Jersey.

There’s not even satisfaction in the final revelation. A good twist can make an ordinary exchange sinister in retrospect. It can expose a motive that was visible all along but easy to misunderstand. A Murder Between Friends keeps supplying more information without making the people or their behavior appreciably more compelling. Eventually, another revelation just means another stretch of explanation.

The cheapness would be easier to forgive if the film had a stronger sense of rhythm or a more distinctive personality. I have defended the outrageous implausibility of Aenigma, a film whose absurdities are part of its appeal. I can happily overlook a great deal when a filmmaker gives me something inventive to watch. Here, the odd production choices and narrative contrivances grow too tiring too quickly.

I stopped enjoying the next bad decision and started resenting the time it took to slog to the end. Even the candles lost their comic appeal. I had noticed them, laughed at them, and was still sitting there while they continued to burn.

The fascination surrounding The Room, as well as its resurgence following the release of The Disaster Artist, depends on a strange feeling that almost anything might happen next. Its failures keep producing fresh astonishment. A Murder Between Friends made me laugh early, then settled into a much less enjoyable pattern of obvious developments and prolonged indifference. I could see where it was going. I simply wanted it to get there.

By the end, this had become one of the worst films I’ve ever sat through. The mystery failed to intrigue me, the comedy exhausted my patience, and the setting made me question everything else. I had started by finding the mess amusing. I finished feeling as though I had been left at a murder-mystery weekend after all the entertaining guests had gone home.

Poor Joan Collins.

A Murder Between Friends (2026) Rating: 1/2 out of 5

If you’d like to watch A Murder Between Friends, you can stream, rent, or purchase it via Amazon.