A Haunting in Venice **½ (2023, Kenneth Branagh, Kyle Allen, Camille Cottin, Jamie Dornan, Tina Fey, Michelle Yeoh) – Classic Movie Review 12,643

Agatha Christie’s 1969 detective novel Hallowe’en Party is re-titled, reworked and transposed from England to Venice as the third of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot films, the 2023 mystery crime drama A Haunting in Venice.

Agatha Christie’s 1969 detective novel Hallowe’en Party is re-titled and transposed from England to the titular city and adapted as the third of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot films, the 2023 mystery crime drama A Haunting in Venice. Also in the less starry than usual cast of good actors are Kyle Allen, Camille Cottin, Jamie Dornan, Tina Fey, Jude Hill, Ali Khan, Emma Laird, Kelly Reilly, Riccardo Scamarcio, and Michelle Yeoh. The ensemble cast is a good idea and it’s another good idea to take on one of Christie’s least famous novels, freshening the franchise.

They tease a bit with the new title’s idea of hauntings, with Branagh describing the film as a ‘supernatural thriller’, but it is a straightforward mystery film. The mystery itself is quite complex, so audiences need their wits about them and have to stay alert, and quite satisfying. It’s a sequel to Branagh’s Death on the Nile (2022) and unfolds ten years after the events of that movie.

Branagh plays the celebrated Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, now in 1947 retired and living in Venice, who is reluctantly persuaded by thriller novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) to go with her to a Halloween party séance at a dark, allegedly haunted palazzo where a murder took place a year ago. It is the murder of Alicia Drake, daughter of party hostess Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), who has organised the séance by medium Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) to contact the dead girl. While the storm rages in the canals outside and the group are cut off from the outside world, it is not too long before there is another murder, and Poirot’s life is threatened too.

By the way, man of super-intelligence Poirot believes in logic, deduction and evidence, and there is no evidence for God, so therefore he doesn’t believe in spirits, ghosts or the presence of the dead either. Poirot believes in the leetle grey cells not in hauntings and séances. He has lost his faith in God and humanity,

A Haunting in Venice is a slight surprise, and a pleasant one. Starting from one of Christie’s least well known and least regarded novels, it is reworked in an efficient screenplay by Michael Green into a spectacularly dark, downbeat and gloomy screen event. Branagh as director keeps it quite tight, tense and compact, with enough going on, tension and atmosphere in a shortish running time of 104 minutes. As actor, he keeps it quite lowkey, and fairly impressive, though there’s still a little too much facial hair in the makeup and ‘Allo ‘Allo vocals in the performance. Sometimes, though, the turn is satisfyingly thoughtful and reflective, with Branagh entirely abandoning slicing the ham. He adopts the sad, wise old person persona, much like Joan Hickson in her BBC Miss Marple series of films. He’s seen too many murders, too many bad people.

All the other performances are very downbeat, which is just as well considering the nest of vipers the actors are having to play. There’s not one character with any real redeeming features, though at the end the reflective canny old Poirot is willing to forgive most of them. Tina Fey’s unusual casting doesn’t quite pay off and some of the other actors don’t have enough to do, but the cast is stalwart.

All in all, A Haunting in Venice is quite entertaining and much better than expected, and a huge improvement on Death on the Nile. It is a good advert for Venice and Christie, though, heaven knows, neither needs an advert as both of them are well sold already, some might say flogged to death. Venice is now charging tourists five euros to get in! Even so, it’s cheaper than a movie ticket.

The production is first rate. It looks a treat thanks to the cinematography by Haris Zambarloukos and sounds good too as Hildur Guðnadóttir composes the score (the first in the series not composed by Patrick Doyle).

Filming began on 31 October 2022 at Pinewood Studios and in Venice.

A Haunting in Venice premiered at London’s Odeon Leicester Square on 11 September 2023 and was released in the US on 15 September 2023 by 20th Century Studios.

Duration: 104 minutes.

Production: 20th Century Studios, Scott Free Productions, The Mark Gordon Company, Genre Films, Agatha Christie Limited, Agatha Christie Productions.

The cast are Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot, Camille Cottin as Olga Seminoff, Jamie Dornan as Dr Leslie Ferrier, Tina Fey as Ariadne Oliver, Jude Hill as Leopold Ferrier, Ali Khan as Nicholas Holland, Emma Laird as Desdemona Holland, Kelly Reilly as Rowena Drake, Riccardo Scamarcio as Vitale Portfoglio, Michelle Yeoh as Joyce Reynolds, and Rowan Robinson as Alicia Drake.

Michael Green also wrote the screenplays of Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.

Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party was first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in November 1969 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in 1969. It is dedicated to P G Wodehouse.

In the novel, the mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver attends a Hallowe’en party at Rowena Drake’s home in Woodleigh Common, when 13-year-old Joyce Reynolds tells everyone she had once seen a murder, but had not realised it was one until later. When the party ends, Joyce is found drowned in an apple bobbing tub. Michael Green’s screen story is an interesting spin on Christie’s plot and characters, for this is no straightforward filming of the book.

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,643

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