A Haunting in Venice review: Branagh's best Poirot yet

A good spot of head-scratching is what we expect when we encounter an intricately puzzling Agatha Christie plot, but Kenneth Branagh presents us with a real brain-twister in A Haunting in Venice. His third screen outing as Christie’s brilliant Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is teasingly poised between crime mystery and haunted house horror movie. Has he made a whodunnit or a woo-woo dunnit?

As with his previous films in what is shaping up as an Agatha Christie cinematic franchise, director-star Branagh takes us to an exotic and glamorous location — a Venice of mists, masks, and black-cloaked gondoliers. It is 1947, a full decade after his extravagantly mustached sleuth solved those baffling murders aboard a snowbound train in Murder on the Orient Express and a luxury paddle steamer in Death on the Nile.

However, Poirot has seen enough of death and with Europe still reeling from the Second World War, he has retired from crime-solving and is living in solitary, self-imposed exile. That hasn’t stopped a queue of would-be clients forming outside his Venetian home each day, anxious for him to take on their cases, but he has employed a dogged former Italian policeman (Riccardo Scamarcio) as a bodyguard to keep them at bay with a well-timed tackle or if need be, by tipping the most persistent into the nearest canal.

Even so, an old friend, mystery writer Ariadne Oliver — Tina Fey supplying a nice dash of humour as Christie’s playful self-portrait — manages to get past Poirot’s human guard dog. She wants Poirot to accompany her to a séance at the palazzo of celebrated opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) and expose the visiting medium as a fraud. Rowena wishes to speak with the spirit of her dead daughter, Alicia, who died in mysterious circumstances a year ago. Famous clairvoyant Joyce Reynolds (an enigmatic Michelle Yeoh) insists she can genuinely converse with the girl’s ghost, but Poirot, his life governed by reason, logic, and rational deduction, is convinced he will see through her tricks.

Rowena’s grand but decaying palazzo — reputedly haunted by the spirits of orphaned children who were locked inside it during a plague — is a spooky enough place even before the séance gets underway. It also happens to be Halloween night and a storm is raging outside. No wonder many of those present tonight are on edge.

They include Rowena’s loyal housekeeper, Olga Seminoff (Call My Agent’s Camille Cottin), and her family doctor, Leslie Ferrier (Heart of Stone's Jamie Dornan), traumatized by his experiences in the war; Ferrier’s precocious 10-year-old son Leopold (Jude Hill, reunited with Dornan, his on-screen father, too, in Branagh’s Belfast); Joyce’s flinty assistant Desdemona (Emma Laird); and an ambitious young chef, Maxime (Kyle Allen), who ruthlessly broke off his engagement to Alicia to her great distress. In other words, there are plenty of suspects at hand when a death takes place. But is it the work of human agency or are supernatural things really going on?

A Haunting in Venice is a good deal more fun, and a good deal more successful as a film, than Branagh’s previous effort. That bungled adaptation of Death on the Nile, saw fit to give Poirot’s mustache its own origin story and tried to turn Christie’s fastidious detective into something of an action hero, with scenes showing him throwing a meat cleaver at an assailant and holding his suspects at gunpoint.

Amid all this surprising derring-do, Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green have also been striving in their adaptations to give Poirot a psychological depth you don’t find in Christie’s books (hence the moustache-explaining backstory). In the process, however, they appear to have lost sight of what we look for when we pick up one of Poirot’s cases — the pleasure of watching Christie’s eccentric detective patiently piecing together a series of cunningly disguised clues.

With Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile Branagh and Green were, of course, not just adapting Christie, they were also remaking a pair of hit films — the first, from 1974, with Albert Finney in the lead; the second, from 1978, starring Peter Ustinov. Given this, the pair may have assumed that Christie’s fiendishly clever plots were too well known not to require some jazzing up.

Branagh and Green have taken much greater liberties with A Haunting in Venice. Very little of their source — Christie’s English country house mystery Hallowe’en Party — remains on the screen, save for the story’s Halloween setting, a handful of character names, and the notion of bobbing for apples. This means they have had to come up with an entirely fresh plot. This time, though, their contrivances work.

Drawing inspiration from a collection of Christie short stories that touch on the supernatural, The Last Seance, Branagh and Green create nerve-tingling tension from the clash between Poirot’s world of logic and a very different world that may contain ghosts and ghoulish goings on. Add director of photography Harris Zambarloukos’s titled camera angles and it’s no wonder we feel eerily off balance. The film’s Venetian backdrop works superbly, too, and is a lot more convincing than Death on the Nile’s fake-looking blue-screen Egypt. Rowena’s palazzo may have been created in a Pinewood studio but, like the film itself, it is effectively creepy and chilling. Woo-woo? Maybe. Whoo-hoo! Definitely.

A Haunting in Venice hits theaters on Friday, September 15, 2023. For more info on all the remaining releases of the year, check out our guide to the new movies still to come in 2023.