Actor, writer, director Kenneth Branagh (Belfast, 2021) is back again to remind all of us movie lovers his passion for famous literature with the polished mystery film, A Haunting in Venice. Directed by (and starring) Branagh, A Haunting in Venice is his third adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel.
After directing and/or starring in five film adaptations of Shakespeare plays from 1989 to the early 2000s, Kenneth Branagh has more recently set his sights on another source of popular stories. These stories are serious, exotic, ensemble, murder mysteries centered around Hercule Poirot, one of Agatha Christie's most enduring detective characters.
Branagh's first Agatha Christie adaptation was Murder on the Orient Express in 2017 and followed that with Death on the Nile in 2022. Both of these films were adaptations of well-known novels that have already been adapted into films successfully in the 1970s, and this was one of the reasons these 2 Branagh films were boring and clumsy.
But A Haunting in Venice is not boring or clumsy in large part because of how it adapts its source material. This film is loosely adapted from Agatha Christie's 1969 novel Hallowe'en Party. But the word "loosely" is not strong enough, or accurate enough, a word to capture how different the film and novel are from each other.
In the film, Hercule Poirot is invited by a friend to attend a seance at the Italian home of a distraught woman mourning the recent death of her daughter. After the seance, dead bodies are discovered, a giant rainstorm arrives sequestering all the seance guests, and Monsieur Poirot works his deductive magic to identify the killer.
The pacing of the story, cast of characters, and sneaky twists are all pleasantly surprising, because they have so little in common with the novel Hallowe'en Party. The novel has no seance, is not set in Venice and takes place years after the late 1940s of the film. But these discrepancies are exactly why the film is delightfully less predictable and not bogged down with such an oversized cast of suspects who each need their moment in the spotlight.
A Haunting in Venice is most fun because its emotional and visual atmosphere is smoothly sustained. It's spooky, with distant creaking in the giant stone house, shadow-filled hallways, crackling fireplaces and walls dripping in water. (Is this home on the canals of Venice really haunted?) Branagh has lots of fun highlighting all the areas of the house by using canted angles in every scene and holding quiet close-ups of a cockatoo bird observing all the action from its perch.
There's a few conversations that feel stiff or inelegant, as if the screenplay (written by Michael Green of Blade Runner 2049) is trying to pack as much background information as possible into every scene. That kind of writing distracts, at times, from the growing mystery and makes the somber musings on death and reality feel more like a moderately anticipatory (and cerebral) journey toward discovery.
Is A Haunting in Venice one of the best films I've seen this year? No. But it remains mostly entertaining and is a great improvement from Director Branagh's previous two Christie adaptations. This film reminds viewers maybe it's good to avoid writing the most faithful adaptation from a beloved novelist and embrace more creative license instead. It's also moderately amusing watching Tina Fey (Wine Country, 2019) play against type as Hercule Poirot's friend as she manages to avoid any punchlines or pratfalls.
