Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!
Sometimes, an actor falls in love with a character and they can’t walk away from that character. Kenneth Branagh appears to have become entranced with the character of Hercule Poirot. A Haunting in Venice is the third Branagh Poirot movie; he got through the two classics in A Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. In that respect, A Haunting in Venice is treading a little bit of new ground. It’s nice to see some new Poirot stories on the big screen rather than the same two over and over. That said, it’s probably inevitable that Branagh will eventually adapt Evil Under the Sun.
Right now, there are two mystery franchises that have large budgets and attract a good number of stars. Branagh’s Poirot films are one of them; the second is the Knives Out series with Daniel Craig. Branagh’s films are period pieces and are adapted from Agatha Christie stories. If you’re going to adapt a mystery, you could do a lot worse than the grande dame of whodunnits. Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films are modern and original. Both include a star actor who clearly loves the role. And if you ask me to put my money on one, I’m going with Knives Out.
One of the joys of this sort of film is that aside from the main character, everything else change. So, we’re going to have Branagh’s Hercule Poirot with a whole new group of people to interact with. As the title suggests, this takes place in Venice, which continues the idea of sticking Poirot into an exotic and far-off locale. So, at least on the surface, this is what we expect—Poirot, a mystery, and somewhere fabulous.
This movie represents a significant shift in tone, however. Where the first two Branagh mysteries were straight up whodunnit mysteries, A Haunting in Venice is a horror movie before it is a mystery. When we start, Poirot is living a life away from his former glory as a detective, in something like retirement, in post-World War II Venice. Despite his semi-retirement in Venice, he appears to be constantly vexed by people bothering him to take up cases. He denies them all until a visit from Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a mystery author in search of a new story.
Her story involves the death of the daughter of a retired opera singer named Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly). On Halloween, a séance is planned in her palazzo, and since Ariadne has been invited, she drags her old friend Poirot along. We’ll get the standard cast of characters for an Agatha Christie story. We have Dr. Leslie Ferrier, a former doctor haunted by what he saw in World War II (Jamie Dornan); Maxime Gerard, the dead woman’s ex-fiancé (Kyle Allen); Olga, the superstitious and religious housekeeper (Camille Cottin); the doctor’s young son Leopold (Jude Hill); and Vitale Portfoglio (Riccardo Scamarcio), Poirot’s bodyguard. Into this, we add Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), a former nurse who now performs séances. She brings with her a pair of assistants, Nicholas and Desdemona (Ali Khan and Emma Laird). And over all of this is the fact that the palazzo is reputedly cursed by the souls of children who died there when it was used as an orphanage.
Naturally, Poirot immediately exposes Reynolds as a fake, but then come some things that he can’t explain. And soon after, Joyce Reynolds is found having fallen out of a window, impaled on a statue and very, very dead. And so this is the case that we’ll be following, where Poirot interviews all of the possible suspects in the house and slowly, the case takes shape. In this case, however, we’ll also be dealing with things that very much look like touches of the supernatural. So, while this is very much a mystery, it’s just as much a horror movie with hints of films like The Orphanage and The Others.
A Haunting in Venice succeeds in being very atmospheric. And, like any episode of Scooby-Doo, we’re going to end up with a killer being unmasked and everything explained, kind of. For anyone who is a fan of the classic Scooby-Doos or the sorts of mysteries where the world is righted once again without any reference to the supernatural, this one leaves a bit to be desired. Of course, what happens at the end can be explained away, but it leaves a bit of bad taste, at least in my mouth.
These are fun films, and this was entertaining, if for no other reason than it’s a story I haven’t seen adapted before. But for my money, I’m much more a fan of Benoit Blanc.
Why to watch A Haunting in Venice: It’s nice to see a new Poirot adaptation.
Why not to watch: The Knives Out movies are better.