Kenneth Branagh’s third Hercule Poirot movie does everything it can to divorce itself from the quaintness of a typical Agatha Christie adaptation. Loosely based on the novel Hallowe’en Party, this outing swaps exotic locales for the claustrophobic confines of a gothic Venetian palazzo and flirts outright with horror. The film, shot through more Dutch angles than an Amsterdam maths class has ever seen, uses the genre’s visual language to credibly suggest that this mystery might actually have paranormal undertones. Forcing Poirot to reconsider his die-hard loyalty to rational explanations is an interesting twist — it punctures the idea of him as a mystery-solving god and gives the film bigger questions to chew on than whodunnit.
What that does, however, is sap the satisfaction of watching him expertly crack the puzzle, because the movie spends so much time centering Poirot’s crisis of confidence. A Haunting in Venice’s tone switch to serious horror is also at odds with the campily bad accents and mostly overwrought acting from the (much less starry than usual) cast. It’s not the same kind of reliable guilty pleasure we expect these vehicles to be, then, but this outing of Branagh’s Poirot is at least an interesting experiment in expanding these stories’ usual limits.
"Branagh’s film has the charm of ridiculous excess: stylistic flourishes are piled high into a treasury of gothic camp, and the camera is tilted, regardless of provocation, at the most alarming angles—Dutch angles, as they are known in the trade."
— Anthony Lane
"I hope [Branagh] makes ten more of these."
— Bilge Ebiri
Celebrated sleuth Hercule Poirot, now retired and living in self-imposed exile in Venice, reluctantly attends a Halloween séance at a decaying, haunted palazzo. When one of the guests is murdered, the detective is thrust into a sinister world of shadows and secrets.
In 1947 Italy, Hercule Poirot is invited to a seance at an apparently haunted Venice mansion, where a war-time tragedy, the mysterious recent death of a girl, and the murder of another guest converge to pull him out of retirement.
As is expected for a Christie mystery, every character’s a suspect in A Haunting in Venice, but a surprisingly credible one is Leopold (played by Jude Hill, the Belfast scene-stealer who reunites here with Branagh and Jamie Dornan). He’s a creepy, precocious child who — when you actually think about it — probably isn’t going to be responsible for any of the deaths Poirot is investigating, but it’s to Hill’s credit that he makes you seriously consider the possibility in spite of what logic is telling you. What’s more, by the film’s tragedy-tinged end, he emerges as the most believably complex of the film’s many characters — an actual human, in contrast to the plainly engineered vehicles for motives that surround him.
Poirot needs to investigate the murder of all these accents next.
