If Death on the Nile is the elegant dinner party, Evil Under the Sun is the one where everyone’s had a second cocktail and the gossip turns delicious. Peter Ustinov’s first outing as Poirot played things grand and stately. His second trades the Nile for the Adriatic, Egypt’s monuments for Majorca’s beaches, and composure for something far more fun: a cast of world-class actors who seem to be competing for who can deliver the most devastating insult. Kino Lorber’s new 4K UHD captures every sunlit barb in gorgeous detail.

Guy Hamilton came to this fresh off directing The Mirror Crack’d two years earlier, and the experience clearly loosened him up. Where that film was a cozy English village mystery, this one is a scorched cocktail of venom and glamour. Arlena Marshall (Diana Rigg, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) is a glamorous, thoroughly insufferable actress vacationing at an exclusive island resort, and she has a genuine talent for making enemies.

Her husband Kenneth (Denis Quilley) suffers in noble silence. A younger man, Patrick Redfern (Nicholas Clay), orbits her with obvious intent. And the resort’s owner, Daphne Castle (Maggie Smith, Downton Abbey: A New Era), watches the whole escalating disaster with the kind of disdain only Maggie Smith can manufacture. When Arlena turns up strangled on the beach, every single guest has an alibi. That’s when Poirot — and the film — really starts having fun.

Hamilton understood that the joy of a Christie mystery isn’t just the puzzle. It’s the pleasure of watching sharp people be vicious to each other in beautiful settings. Rigg is deliciously awful as the woman everyone wants dead, delivering every line like she knows the camera loves her and doesn’t care if you don’t. Smith gets the best retorts in the film and, no surprise, times them like a surgeon. Roddy McDowall, James Mason, Sylvia Miles, and Jane Birkin fill out a supporting cast that knows exactly how campy this material is and commits completely. The whole thing gets tipsier and more fun as it goes, building to a resolution that clicks into place with satisfying precision.

Ustinov is even more relaxed here than in Death on the Nile, and the performance is better for it. His Poirot feels less like a detective solving a case and more like the smartest person at a resort who happens to catch a killer between cocktails. Anthony Shaffer’s screenplay stays faithful to Christie while leaning harder into humor, Christopher Challis’s cinematography makes Majorca look like the most beautiful crime scene in cinema, and Cole Porter’s music — arranged and conducted by John Lanchbery — gives every scene a breezy, sunlit elegance that makes murder feel almost civilized.

Kino Lorber’s 4K disc features a new HDR/Dolby Vision master from a 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative, and the upgrade is significant. The Mediterranean palette comes alive — warm skin tones, vivid blues, sharp detail in both the sun-blasted exteriors and the lamp-lit resort interiors. An audio commentary from Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell, and Nathaniel Thompson accompanies both discs, with a making-of featurette, radio spots, and the theatrical trailer rounding out the package.

This is Christie at her most entertaining and Ustinov at his most charming, wrapped in a mystery that never takes itself too seriously and a 4K presentation that makes you feel the Mediterranean heat. Pour yourself something cold and press play.