Rihanna hasn’t released new music in 84 years, but her work is still making an impact. Take her 2011 hit single “We Found Love,†for example — decorated writer and actress Brit Marling just cited the song as emblematic of the central relationship in her upcoming whodunit, A Murder at the End of the World. The FX on Hulu series, out November 14, tells the story of internet-famous amateur sleuth Darby Hart (Emma Corrin) who encounters her estranged first love, Bill (Harris Dickinson), at a billionaire tech scion’s remote Icelandic retreat. Before their breakup, the couple investigated a serial killer across the U.S. together.
“We’re telling this cross-country road trip story inside this, about two people who are falling in love,†Marling said at Vulture Festival on November 12. “They’re falling in love, picking up the bones of women as they cross the country, and I remember thinking a lot about Rihanna’s song. ‘We fell in love in a hopeless place,’ you know?†The desolate locales in Murder at the End of the World point to “strange feelings coming out of the pandemic and in the climate crisis,†she adds. “There’s a certain darkness that sometimes feels overwhelming. We wanted to try to tell a story that was honest about that and didn’t look away.†Come for the mention of Rihanna’s single that ran through early-2010s Tumblr like the tomb raider, stay for the topical themes about keeping it real in our current moment. The multifaceted power of the whodunit genre.