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A Haunting in Venice: who wouldn’t want to experience one of those? As a title, it certainly has more allure than the more bluntly factual Poirot III. But let’s be frank, that is what the film is: director and star Kenneth Branagh returning again to the role of virtuoso detective, having cracked in short order the Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and suffered a Death on the Nile (2022).
Yet if Branagh has set busily about Agatha Christie’s back catalogue, he has also started cheating slightly. Christie diehards puzzled by which novel the film adapts will find it based on 1969’s Hallowe’en Partythough now artfully relocated from the fictional English village of Woodleigh Common. Scriptwriter Michael Green has tweaked the plot too, which some might see as another canny move. “Reads as if spoken into a tape-recorder and never read through afterward,” remarked Christie authority Robert Barnard of the original.
The Venetian ambience is generously applied. Many, many gondolas. (Actually, unlike the first two Poirotsthe new film was shot where it claims to be set. It helps.) But something else is laid on thicker yet: a spectral chill. The year is 1947, and the sombre ripples of a recent death in Venice lead the semi-retired Poirot to spend Halloween night at a grand palazzo with a grim history. Evil may be among us, albeit jostling for room with the large ensemble cast. Make way for, among others, Tina Fey playing a fast-talking crime writer, Jamie Dornan nursing grief and a strong drink, and a glinting Michelle Yeoh as a celebrated medium, moving between dry detachment and demon-voiced seancemanship.
As with any social function that ends in murder, there are those you’d have liked to have spent longer with, and others whose survival you may find wearying. But Branagh is clearly having fun putting Poirot through a ghoulish filter, complete with skewed Dutch angles, dank secret chambers and pale children reading Poe in the corner. The result isn’t a horror, but like the host of a Halloween bash, it is extravagantly dressed as one.
Are the formal possibilities of cinema itself being expanded by A Haunting in Venice? They are not. Is there much harm in the ultra-competent mainstream entertainment it offers, respectful of its audience and its role as Sunday evening TV turbocharged for the big screen? No again. The worst you could say is that the movie doesn’t match up to the film you feel Branagh sometimes sees out of the corner of his eye, one whose asides about God, war and the spirit world suggest the kind of mournful history lesson Guillermo del Toro can do so beautifully.
Branagh is not del Toro. But he has his own strengths, and A Haunting in Venice plays to them. If Venice itself provides star presence, the movie also has a sharp eye for faces that fit the mood. Chief supporting actors Camille Cottin and Riccardo Scamarcio have the look of actors who have stepped straight out of a postwar Italian melodrama. There are sturdy performances, in the correct tonal register.
That much has not been a given with these Poirots. In Death on the Nilehalf the cast went panto from the off. (It may have been why Branagh pushed himself to the front of every scene instead.) Here, though, for all the creepshow trappings, the film relaxes. For once, Branagh seems confident in how much you can please a crowd simply with committed performances and high-end smoke and mirrors: an enduring truth for both a movie and a medium.
★★★☆☆
In cinemas from September 15
