The Oxford Murders is a 2008 thriller drama film co-written and directed by Álex de la Iglesia and starring Elijah Wood, John Hurt, Leonor Watling and Julie Cox.

[3] In 1993, Martin (Elijah Wood), a US student at the University of Oxford, wants Arthur Seldom (John Hurt) as his thesis supervisor.

Hoping to impress his idol, Martin disputes this, asserting his faith in the absolute truth of mathematics: "I believe in the number pi".

He also runs into Seldom, who is visiting Kalman (Alex Cox), a former student who went mad and suffers from a debilitating cancer, with bone involvement.

Soon after, the patient who shares the room with Seldom's friend dies of an apparent lethal injection and the authorities receive a second symbol: two interlocking arcs.

Afterwards, Seldom tells Martin a story about a nineteenth century man who had written a diary listing ways to kill his wife.

Seeing the students as unfit to live and wanting to provide organ donors to save his own daughter's life, he blows up the bus, killing the children and himself.

The characters debate several mathematical, physical and philosophical concepts such as logical series, Wittgenstein's rule-following paradox, Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty, Gödel's Theorem, circles, the Vesica Piscis, the possibility of perfect crime, Fermat's Last Theorem and its proof by Professor Wiles, the Taniyama conjecture, the tetraktys and the Pythagoreans.

Contrary to a statement made early in the film, electromechanical computers (namely the "Bombe") played a crucial role in the breaking of the German "Enigma" cipher by British (and earlier, Polish) cryptographers during WW2.

Before the confirmation of Elijah Wood in the film, Mexican actor Gael García Bernal had been considered for the role of the mathematics student.

De la Iglesia also praised Wood: "I'm delighted to work with Elijah, who undoubtedly has the most powerful eyes in the industry and who is perfect for the part".

[5] British actor John Hurt was cast in the role of a professor of the university, who helps the young student in his quest to try to stop a series of murders.

[8][9][10][11] Filming began on 22 January 2007 and finished on 24 March, with locations in Oxford and the Cast Courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum of London.

David Lewis, a critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote that despite the fact that "there were plenty of talented people involved", the film had a "clunky script" and was "just plain boring, from beginning to end".

[14] Jonathan Holland from Variety was less critical, calling the film a "polished but verbose whodunit", though he found fault with the dialogue and the romantic subplot.