Director Kenneth Branagh has been having a nice little thing going directing and starring in a series of Hercule Poirot films. Yes, they aren’t exactly faithful to how author Agatha Christie wrote the Belgian detective–too many action scenes for the purists–by Branagh puts together nice casts full of familiar faces, and the movie’s are always more or less self-contained. I found Murder on the Orient Express to be a bit of fun, and so was Death on the Nile. These are generally fun if not great movies. Now comes the most recent, this one based on a lesser-know Poirot novel called Hallowe’en Party. I even found the original novel at Barnes & Noble after the movie, and not only has it been republished as A Haunting in Venice, but the plot description on the back of the book seemed to have nothing to do with the movie I had just seen.
Granted, I had a hard time remembering the title of this one for some reason.
Hercule Poirot has lost faith in humanity and retired to Venice where his bodyguard Portfoglio (Riccardo Scamarcio), a former policeman, keeps people away from him. Then one day, Poirot gets a visit from famous author and longtime friend Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), looking to shake him out of his funk by taking him to a Halloween night seance held in a supposedly haunted house. The current resident is opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), looking to contact her dead daughter. The medium, Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), claims to be the real deal, but Poirot highly doubts it. He doesn’t believe anyone can contact the dead, largely because he can’t bring himself to believe that a God exists after everything he’s seen, so an afterlife is outside the realm of the possible.
Then in the middle of a storm, the seance goes off, and Poirot quickly proves parts of it false before more suspicious activity happens. Is there a ghost? Poirot doubts it, but when Reynolds turns up dead, he can deal with a murderer. There are the usual assortment of suspects, including Rowena, Portfoglio, and Oliver, but there’s also superstitious housekeeper Olga Seminoff (Camille Cottin), PTSD-racked Dr. Leslie Ferrier (Jamie Dornan), Ferrier’s Poirot-like young son Leopold (Jude Hill, who also played a younger version of Branagh in Belfast), the dead daughter’s ex-fiance Maxime Gerard (Kyle Allen), and Reynold’s assistants, half-siblings Desdemona (Emma Laird) and Nicholas (Ali Khan). One or more of these people is a killer, and Poirot may be able to find out who. You know, unless it’s a ghost.
Normally, I rather like these. Again, I don’t love ’em, but I like ’em. Branagh, as director, tries something different here, trying to give the movie more of a horror movie look to fit in with the ghost story theme. Saying whether or not there is a ghost would be telling, but camera angles often seem to be set above or below the actors, the setting is dark, and there’s even a jumpscare or two. Is it effective? Not as effective as I’ve seen in some of the better horror movies, but it does give the movie a distinctive look. Essentially, this is Branagh setting Poirot down in a horror movie, and it may not be the best place to set the detective, but the movie still hits the same familiar beats as the other two movies in the series.
And yet, it doesn’t work as well for me as I would have liked it to. I chalk part of that up to Fey’s character. She just doesn’t fit well into this movie, speaking with an odd accent and dropping lines about whether or not Poirot is back or not. As Poirot allies go, she doesn’t work as well as some have in other adaptations, and though I usually like Fey, not so much here. She’s just miscast in this one. And it kind of fits with A Haunting in Venice in general: it just doesn’t quite work despite the fact that I normally like these movies.
Grade: C+
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