Playing Sherlock Holmes in the movies is one thing.
Solving an actual murder while trapped on an island with the killer is considerably more complicated.
Netflix has released the official trailer for The Final Problem, a stylish new Spanish mystery thriller based on the bestselling novel by acclaimed author Arturo Pérez-Reverte.
And its premise feels like a particularly irresistible collision between Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie.
The four-part limited series takes audiences to the spring of 1959, where thirteen people find themselves stranded at an isolated hotel on a small island off the coast of Mallorca.
A violent storm has cut the island off from the outside world.
Nobody can leave.
Nobody can arrive.
Then one of the guests dies.
Elisa Mander, a quiet English tourist, is discovered dead inside the hotel.
At first, the circumstances appear to point towards suicide.
They do not stay that way for long.
Something about the death does not make sense.
Evidence begins suggesting that Elisa was murdered.
And suddenly every person trapped inside the hotel becomes a potential suspect.
Fortunately — or perhaps unfortunately — one of the guests has spent years pretending to know exactly how to solve a crime.
José Coronado stars as Basil, an ageing actor whose most famous role was Sherlock Holmes.
Basil may have retired from the screen, but years spent inhabiting literature’s most famous detective have apparently left him with a few useful habits.
Observation.
Deduction.
Suspicion.
And an instinct for noticing when somebody’s story does not quite fit.
When Elisa’s death becomes increasingly suspicious, Basil almost accidentally finds himself doing in real life what audiences once watched him do in cinemas.
The difference is that there is no screenplay telling him who the murderer is.
And whoever committed the crime is still somewhere inside the hotel.
Netflix’s new trailer leans heavily into that delicious setup.
Guests exchange suspicious glances.
Stories begin contradicting one another.
Private conversations suddenly become evidence.
And the luxurious hotel gradually transforms into a locked-room crime scene where every corridor, bedroom and dining table may contain another clue.
Basil is not completely alone in his investigation.
Martiño Rivas plays Francisco Foxá, an aspiring thriller writer who joins him in searching the hotel for answers.
The partnership creates an amusingly self-aware detective team.
One man spent years portraying a fictional investigator.
The other wants to become a successful crime novelist.
Neither is actually a police detective.
Now they are apparently the best option available.
María Valverde stars as Adela Figueroa, a mysterious young woman travelling with a friend whose presence quickly becomes part of Basil’s increasingly complicated investigation.
Maribel Verdú plays Mrs. Ausländer, the hotel manager, who must maintain some appearance of control while guests begin suspecting one another and the body count threatens to turn her isolated establishment into something considerably less welcoming.
The ensemble also includes Gonzalo de Castro as Fonseca, an ambitious film director, alongside Cristina Kovani, José Condessa and Pepón Nieto.
That large cast is essential to the structure.
The Final Problem is built around one of mystery fiction’s most enduring pleasures:
A limited group of suspects trapped together somewhere they cannot escape.
The storm eliminates easy answers.
There is no unknown killer who can simply disappear into the city.
If Elisa Mander was murdered, somebody inside that hotel almost certainly knows more than they are saying.
That turns every character into both witness and suspect.
And every new revelation has the potential to completely rearrange the investigation.
The 1959 setting adds another layer to the mystery.
There are no mobile phones.
No instant database searches.
No modern surveillance network waiting to identify somebody in seconds.
Basil has to rely on people.
What they say.
What they avoid saying.
What they remember.
And what they may desperately want everyone else to forget.
That feels especially appropriate for a protagonist whose entire detective education comes from playing Sherlock Holmes.
The trailer repeatedly plays with the line between performance and reality.
Basil knows how a great detective is supposed to behave because he has performed that behaviour for cameras.
But real murder does not necessarily follow the rules of fiction.
People lie badly.
People lie brilliantly.
Evidence can be misleading.
And suspects do not conveniently reveal themselves during the final scene just because the story has reached its climax.
That distinction appears to become increasingly important as Basil gets deeper into the case.
The title itself is a deliberate Sherlockian reference.
“The Final Problem” is the name of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous 1893 Sherlock Holmes story involving the detective’s confrontation with Professor Moriarty.
Pérez-Reverte’s story uses that literary history as part of its playful relationship with detective fiction.
Basil is not Sherlock Holmes.
But after spending years being publicly associated with the character, separating the actor from the detective may no longer be entirely simple.
Especially when everyone around him starts expecting answers.
The Final Problem also arrives from director Félix Viscarret, with Alberto Macías, Carlos Molinero and Marisol Farré adapting Pérez-Reverte’s novel for television.
Mod Producciones produces the series, with Fernando Bovaira serving as producer and Urko Errazquin as executive producer.
Rather than stretching the mystery across a long season, Netflix has structured the adaptation as four episodes.
That compact format should suit the material particularly well.
One location.
Thirteen trapped people.
One suspicious death.
A shrinking list of possible explanations.
And a former Sherlock Holmes actor discovering that solving murder outside a film set is much more dangerous than he remembers.
For mystery fans, the influences are immediately recognisable.
There is the isolated setting.
The closed circle of suspects.
The storm preventing escape.
The elegant period atmosphere.
And the detective who seems simultaneously perfectly qualified and completely unqualified for the job.
But The Final Problem has one more trick available.
Its investigator knows all of those conventions too.
Basil has spent a career performing mysteries.
He understands how these stories are supposed to work.
The killer may understand them as well.
And that means the greatest problem may not simply be identifying who committed the murder.
It may be determining whether someone inside the hotel is deliberately constructing the perfect mystery for Basil to solve.
The Final Problem premieres globally on Netflix on September 25, 2026.
Watch the official trailer below.
