Branagh, once again putting in the hard yards as both star and director, has attempted something a little different to his two previous Agatha Christie adaptations, Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022). With a shorter and slightly less stellar cast list, he has chosen to loosely adapt Hallowe’en Party (1969), an obscure late-career mystery from the Christie back-catalogue, to make a film that hovers between whodunnit and gothic horror.
The film is set in the canal-laced splendour of post-war Venice. It’s 1947 and Hercule Poirot has retired but his fame has not, necessitating that he employ a bodyguard, Vitale Portfoglio (Riccardo Scamarcio), to keep would-be clients from accosting him for his sleuthing services.
A knock at his door reveals an old acquaintance, crime novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), who made the bestseller lists with a string of mysteries about the adventures of a Belgian detective. Disappointing the critics with her last three books, Ariadne needs a new story and she’s on the trail of famous medium Mrs Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), whom she intends to debunk as a fraud. But she needs help, and invites the notoriously sceptical Poirot to attend the Halloween-night séance of a former opera singer, Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), in her purportedly haunted palazzo where her daughter Alicia (Rowan Robinson) died the previous year.
The beautifully decaying palazzo is almost sinking into the canal under the weight of rumours of curses and hauntings. It was formerly an orphanage, where children were locked inside to die during a plague; now, their spirits have sworn revenge on the living, particularly those in the form of doctors and nurses.
The séance begins, and Poirot swiftly debunks Mrs Reynold’s theatrical attempts to contact Alicia’s spirit. But the night is far from over, and after a botched attempt on Poirot’s life (in which even an attempted drowning cannot dent the outlandish grooming of his legendary moustache), another attendee is murdered.
The palazzo gates are locked and the classic Christie formula kicks into action, albeit this time with a supernatural flavour. Which of the séance’s survivors is the murderer? Or is the culprit a ghost or bent on vengeance?
In his third outing as Poirot, Branagh seems to have settled into both the accent and the facial hair, and Fey’s brash Ariadne Oliver is definitely channelling the fast-talking Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Yeoh’s Mrs Reynold’s packs a memorable punch in her relatively brief screentime, and Jamie Dornan is intense as Leslie Ferrier, slightly overselling his PTSD-besieged doctor. The other memorable role is the bespectacled Edgar Allan Poe-reading Leopold (Jude Hill), the doctor’s precociously mature child.
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The rest of the palazzo-trapped cast fulfill their roles admirably, providing a field of suspects and red herrings with various motives as Poirot investigates the growing list of murders.
Another departure from the Branagh’s previous formula is in the cinematography. Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos has chosen a more hand-held approach, the wobbly, close-focussed camerawork lending a sense of claustrophobia and emphasising the subjective terror of characters trapped overnight in a dark, crumbling and potentially haunted building.
Spooky and classically intriguing, A Haunting in Venice is another solid whodunnit, with just enough gothic glamour to set it apart from the field.
A Haunting in Venice is screening now in cinemas nationally.
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