Having dabbled in numerous franchises from Marvel to Jack Ryan to the numerous plays by William Shakespeare (who might as well be a brand name), Kenneth Branagh finds his comfort zone in recent years with Agatha Christie’s creation, Hercule Poirot. With Branagh now having directed three Agatha Christie whodunits, in which he played the fictional Belgian detective, they don’t do anything groundbreaking with these kinds of narratives, unlike Rian Johnson’s Knives Out and Glass Onion, both of which subvert the tropes you would expect from a whodunit.
However, unlike Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile – iconic storylines of the genre and have been adapted numerous times for the big and small screen, Christie’s 1969 lesser known Hallowe’en Party gets the cinematic treatment, retitled as A Haunting in Venice. Adapted once again by Michael Green, we are introduced to Poirot, now retired and living in Venice. Persuaded by his friend, the mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), Poirot is invited to a séance, only for one of the guests getting murdered, and so it is up to the former detective to once again uncover the killer.
As before, A Haunting in Venice is a scenario that has defined the majority of Poirot’s adventures, where his status as a celebrity gets him to be accompanied by a range of characters, where suspicion is in the air and when murder ensues, his convenient skills as a detective comes in handy as he goes around finding out everyone has their secrets and motives. Whilst you have the familiar tropes, not least the grand climax of Poirot gathering everyone to announce who the culprit is through a long dissection of the case, it is the supernatural element that gives this particular Poirot outing an edge.
Although Branagh is no stranger to gothic material, having directed the disastrous Frankenstein from 1994, where everything is over-cranked, he fares better here where he actually allows moments of quietness, nicely balanced with the sprinkles of horror. Transitioning the source material’s original setting of England to post-World War II Venice, not only does Branagh and his frequent cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos showcase its romanticism, but also its creepy atmosphere at night where Halloween costuming is present. Considering the weird use of Dutch angles in 2011’s Thor, they are more effective here with the low-light interior scenes, shot digitally.
Along with the extravagant mustache, Branagh is having a ball playing the Belgian detective who can balance the humor, which bounces off well with Tina Fey’s Ariadne, but also the dramatic when his non-belief towards the supernatural is challenged. Part of the joy from these movies is seeing an all-star cast playing characters who must hide whatever secrets they may hold, standouts including Jamie Dornan’s PTSD-stricken Dr. Leslie Ferrier and Camille Cottin’s paranoid maid Olga Seminoff. However, once Michelle Yeoh steps in as the medium Joyce Reynolds, she steals the show with a performance that revels in the gothic theme of A Haunting in Venice.
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