Netflix users drawn back into the murder mystery arena by a derivative ‘Knives Out’ clone that makes it really hard to care about whodunit

Netflix has put an increasing amount of eggs in the murder mystery basket since the genre gained a new lease of life, with the whodunit enjoying a resurgence the likes of which it hasn’t experienced in decades. With that in mind, A Deadly Invitation was always going to pique the curiosity of streaming sleuths.

However, you can’t help but find yourself wondering whether it was intentionally designed to be so achingly similar to a recent – and vastly superior – Netflix original that occupied the exact same genre and won rave reviews on its way to monstrous viewership numbers.

The story focuses on an eccentric millionaire, who sends out a mysterious invitation to a band of acquaintances to join her for a remote get-together, where somebody winds up dead. Naturally, the suspects are rooted out one-by-one in an attempt to uncover the killer, with a rookie cop aiming to decipher it was an accident or a revenge plot.

The stock cast of characters include an ex-husband, a fading actor, a former friend, the housekeeper, a doctor, and a yoga instructor, with one of the only stark differences between A Deadly Invitation and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery being that this one unfolds on a yacht (but there is a palatial island mansion), which is a little too Death on the Nile in itself, but that’s a derivative whodunit for you.

Either way, subscribers have opted to whet their insatiable appetite for death and deceit nonetheless, with FlixPatrol naming the Spanish-language twister, turner, and altogether uninspired homage to many better movies as one of the most-watched titles on the global charts following its debut this weekend.