Christie as a horror movie doesn’t work, says Julia Hamilton.
A Haunting in Venice is the third in a trilogy of films produced and acted in by Kenneth Branagh as the celebrated and beloved detective Hercule Poirot.
Every generation has its own Poirot – my favourite of all time is David Suchet, who simply is Poirot. Branagh, however, even with elabor-ately appropriate facial hair, still looks somehow like Branagh with stuck-on whiskers.
The first film in Branagh’s trilogy was, of course, Murder on the Orient Express, followed by Death on the Nile which seemed, Christie-style, to have a curse on it, plagued as it was by Covid-19 delays in production and sexual-misconduct allegations relating to one of its stars. Nevertheless, it did better than expected with both box office and streaming revenues, and Branagh was given the go-ahead to produce and star in this latest iteration, based in fact on Christie’s novel Hallowe’en Party, which, interestingly, his mother was seen reading in Belfast, Branagh’s Bildungsroman about his childhood in Belfast in 1969 at the beginning of the Troubles. Apparently there was no foreshadowing intended, but it makes a neat link.
Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green then decided to move the original location of the book from the rather more prosaic setting of the English countryside to post-World War II Venice and turn a standard Christie whodunnit into a horror movie version – quite a big conceptual leap, to put it mildly. So, instead of the traditional Hallowe’en party of the title, a now-retired Poirot is dragged to a dodgy séance in a decaying palazzo in Venice at the behest of his old friend, mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (the gorgeous Tina Fey). She knows something is amiss but can’t pinpoint what.
Branagh’s previous two Poirot films have been more along the lines of glamorous, fun, highly-coloured whodunnits for fans but, as above, this new venture lurches into the supernatural not entirely successfully. There is the same kind of glittering ensemble cast as in the previous two movies: Academy Award winner Michelle Yeoh, for instance, as the medium Joyce Reynolds, Tina Fey as Ariadne Oliver, plus Branagh’s two old pals from Belfast, Jamie Dornan and Jude Hill; that’s great, but not even all those good-looking, well-dressed people can save this film.
Branagh is a terrific actor and an intelligent presence in whatever he does but turning Christie into gothic horror à la the deeply unsubtle Hollywood model does not work well here.
A Haunting in Venice is Agatha Christie high on benzos and going doolally on the Lido. For a brief moment I wondered if I was in the right film.
The first (of very many) jump scares comes as a chandelier crashes down on the table at the séance where Michelle Yeoh is channelling what appears to be a lost child: “Mama?” enquires a young girl’s voice into the silence: the participants freeze in horror, followed by lots of screaming and scrambling and broken glass, accompanied by weird electronic music, ushering in – in this viewer’s case – a wash of boredom as cold as canal water in winter.
There are all the usual tropes of Hollywood gothic horror: Poirot looking down a plughole where something extremely sinister (and visible to the cinema-goer) is viewing him from the depths, cue more crashing and banging; the lost child, Felicia, peering around a door as Poirot asks her if she has been present all this time, vanishing of course as soon as her mother appears.
A Haunting in Venice is up against The Nun 2 and David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer in terms of release dates, all timed to coincide more or less with Hallowe’en.
I can only imagine that Branagh was under pressure from his Disney bosses to produce something similar. It may turn out to be a box office smash but it’s not Agatha Christie as we know and love her.
I think with affection of Nicholas Roeg’s gothic take on Venice in Don’t Look Now in which the magnificent setting is allowed to speak for itself making the film so much more powerful as a result.
Here, one hackneyed Venetian cliché after another is rammed down the viewer’s throat. At one point a masked and cloaked female figure glides down a canal in a gondola but even the mask is somehow an amped-up Disneyfied version of the dead white of Pierrot’s face, rather than the more traditional beaked version associated with Venice.
Everything is over-elaborated, too flat, too highly-coloured, too noisy which, even with the help of the distinctly murky Venetian light to blur the edges, serves to destroy what should be a kind of subtle magic.
I’m not going to spoil the plot by telling you what happens but suffice to say that Poirot is equal to the challenge he is confronted with. The supernatural might initially baffle those twirling moustaches but the little grey cells come through in the end.
Fingers crossed that if Branagh decides to snatch Poirot out of retirement for another Christie film, then the dead body will be a straight up-and-down murder without the cartoonish gothic histrionics.
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