A Haunting in Venice

Kenneth Branagh is cuckoo for Dutch angles, dramatically slanting his camera around Venice as if to shout, "This. Is. Spooky!" And indeed, A Haunting in Venice is, if only gently; carnival masks, for instance, are inherently spooky, and that alone is good enough reason to port the source text, 1969’s Hallowe’en Party – a late-era, middling Agatha Christie mystery – out of the leafy suburbs of London and over to Gothic Venezia.

The film is an improvement in almost every way on Christie’s book, and a welcome course correction to the first two Hercule Poirot adaptations from director/star Branagh and series scribe Michael Green, 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express and 2022’s Death on the Nile. The previous films’ sprawling, star-studded casts have become tidier and tinier in wattage here. The luxury-travel eye candy has been replaced by a single location, a crumbling palazzo in waterlogged Venice. The obvious CG of Death on the Nile is gone (along with its embarrassing horniness); excepting some supernatural elements, A Haunting in Venice, shot on location, is resolutely lo-fi, contained, handmade even. It’s moody without being tortured, and Poirot’s legendary mustache is blessedly back to being just a mustache and not a metaphor.

Branagh’s exacting Belgian detective is the only carryover character from previous films, but readers will recognize Christie regular Ariadne Oliver. Amusingly reinterpreted by Tina Fey with a Katharine Hepburn-like cheek, international mystery writer Ariadne has hit a cold streak. She goes to Venice, where Poirot has retired, to coax her old friend back into the game, inviting him to attend a séance at the home of an opera singer (Reilly) in the hopes of debunking the famous medium Joyce Reynolds (Yeoh) – all fodder, Ariadne hopes, for her next bestselling book.

Most of the action takes place at the opera singer’s creaky palazzo, where – get this – a murder occurs, and a sudden storm traps the séance guests together under one roof. It’s a terrific setting for a whodunit, murkily lit and suitably melodramatic. The camera’s counterintuitive placements – perched ceiling-height and peering down on the actors’ foreheads; plunked on the floor, tilted upward, toward their wattles – seem to take on the perspective of the ghosts rumored to populate the place, or maybe the rats (we see one crawl out of a gargoyle’s mouth, the right amount of oogly-boogly for a PG-13 rating). It’s all fairly unsubtle, and not infrequently flat-out silly, but I enjoyed its modest charms, especially in contrast to the bombast of Branagh’s previous Poirot pictures.