A Haunting In Venice Review: A Soggy Faux-Supernatural Return For Poirot
Sometimes, you take what you can get at the movies. For example, it is a low bar to clear that the latest entry in the Hercule Poirot Cinematic Universe, "A Haunting in Venice," is an improvement over its predecessor. The 2022 film "Death on the Nile" was turgid, poorly acted, and boasted some of the worst CGI backdrops in big-studio history. So the fact that its immediate follow-up is brisker, offers less painful acting, and very few CGI backdrops is somewhat cold comfort. The stylish first film in the Kenneth Branagh-directed franchise, 2017's "Murder on the Orient Express," seems an awfully long time ago, and whatever sharpness was present has long since evaporated. There are some mild charms and entertainments in "A Haunting in Venice," which tries very, very hard to be spooky and creepy but is saddled with baffling if unsurprising directorial choices and some distracting performances.
The mustachioed Poirot (Branagh) is deliberately trying to not be up to his old tricks again here. He's been living in Venice, post-World War II, for a year with an overly officious bodyguard (Riccardo Scamarcio) keeping any onlookers or people hopeful for the sleuth to solve a mystery away. But when Poirot's old friend, American author Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), shows up, he can't resist her offer: attend a Halloween party that night at the house of ex-opera diva Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), who has invited a self-proclaimed medium (Michelle Yeoh) to conduct a séance in the hopes of interacting with the spirit of her dead daughter. Among the other attendees are the daughter's war-stricken doctor (Jamie Dornan) and his son (Jude Hill), the dead daughter's ex-fiancé (Kyle Allen), and Rowena's zealously religious housekeeper (Camille Cottin). The séance alone implies that Rowena's daughter didn't commit suicide, but was murdered; when one of the aforementioned guests winds up dead after Poirot himself is attacked, the detective is back on the case.
Based yet again on an Agatha Christie novel, "A Haunting in Venice" tries to pose the question of whether or not ghosts are real. Poirot is baffled, if not horrified, to be plagued by strange visions and hearing ghostly children in the walls of the crumbling palazzo where the majority of the film takes place. And while probing the mental strength of a man haunted himself by his own past in both world wars could be fascinating, Branagh the actor is hamstrung by Branagh the director. If you have seen any of his other recent directorial work, from the first "Thor" to "Artemis Fowl," you know that Kenneth Branagh has never met an image he couldn't try to present at a skewed angle, just because. His preference for Dutch angles is at its height in "A Haunting in Venice," with an opening dream sequence where Poirot envisions one bird attacking and killing another on the streets of Venice cluing us into the fact that Branagh and longtime cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos are going all-in. If Kenneth Branagh could marry a canted angle, he would. But this over-preference for aggressively stylish cinematography ends up distracting from the purported eerie aspects of the mystery, instead of heightening them.
A mystery that's not old-fashioned enough
Once you get past the unnecessarily skewed angles, the standard aspects of a Christie mystery are present. As noted, much of the film is very much a drawing-room-style mystery, with a host of potential murderers and other criminals, all of whom are carefully and methodically torn down by Poirot to ensure that he can figure out whodunit. Mercifully, "A Haunting in Venice" does not make the same mistakes its predecessor did in terms of building out an origin story for details of Poirot's life, such as the age-old mystery of why he ever grew that mustache. But while the screenplay (by Michael Green, who wrote the previous two Poirot films) is direct and simple enough in its own structure, not every performance is able to live up to what may have been on the page. Branagh's return as Poirot is as officious and blunt as expected, and he does a reasonable job of communicating mostly through his eyes the confusion and near-terror he begins to feel at what initially seems to be the genuine presence of ghosts.
Among the other performers, the two standouts are Dornan and Hill, both of whom co-starred in another recent Branagh film, his autobiographical drama "Belfast." Dornan is especially effective in building out a character as lovelorn as he is doomed by the memories of what he saw and experienced while fighting in World War II and liberating Jews at the end of the Holocaust. But the two most notable names aside from Branagh are Fey and Yeoh, each of whom is tremendously talented in their own right. So it's all the more disappointing to see them either ill-used or briefly used. In casting Fey, Branagh inadvertently throws a spotlight on an issue that you can't really plan for: it's not that she doesn't do her best in bringing to life a writer as awed by Poirot as she is hungry for her next success. But some performers (particularly comic performers) have a more contemporary sensibility and feel out of place in period pieces. Such is the case here, as Fey's performance feels at odds with the others, simply because it's hard to separate her work on "SNL" and "30 Rock" and the like with something as old-fashioned as this.
It continues to be hard not to watch Kenneth Branagh's Hercule Poirot movies and think briefly of the more modern take, in the form of Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc mysteries. We've now had three recent Poirot films, with "Murder on the Orient Express" continuing to be the best of the lot. There, the old-fashioned murder mystery felt fresh instead of stodgy, lively instead of dry and dull. But when you think about the more contemporary take, blending mystery and satire and thrills with truly inventive writing and brilliant acting, there's something a little less charmingly quaint about the Poirot films and a little more frustrating. "A Haunting in Venice" does try to spice things up, but all the skewed angles in the world can't hide the fact that this mystery is half as eerie as it wants to be, and roughly as entertaining.
/Film Rating: 5 out of 10