Movie Review: A HAUNTING IN VENICE

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: September 15th, 2023 / 01:36 AM

A HAUNTING IN VENICE movie poster | ©2023 20th Century Studios

Rating: PG-13
Stars: Kenneth Branagh, Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Dornan, Tina Fey, Jude Hill, Ricardo Scamarcio, Camille Cottin, Kelly Reilly, Rowena Robinson, Emma Laird, Kyle Allen, Ali Khan
Writer: Michael Green, based on the novel HALLOWE’EN PARTY by Agatha Christie
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Distributor: Twentieth Century Studios
Release Date: September 15, 2023

A HAUNTING IN VENICE is the third Agatha Christie film adaptation directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also stars for the third time as Christie’s brilliant detective Hercule Poirot. Michael Green, the screenwriter of the first two, likewise returns.

We’re in Venice, Italy, 1947. By now, Poirot is physically, psychologically and even spiritually drained by all the violence he’s seen and in some cases inadvertently caused, and who can blame him? So, he’s retired and become a recluse in a nice mansion, relying on his ex-policeman bodyguard Portfoglio (Ricardo Scarmarcio) to keep everybody away.

But just before Halloween, Portfoglio admits Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) to the house. Ariadne is a best-selling author and an old friend of Poirot’s. She tells him she’s seen a medium, Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), who is so convincing that Ariadne is on the verge of believing in the mystic arts after all. Ariadne wants Poirot to accompany her to a séance so that he can figure out how Mrs. Reynolds is really pulling off her effects.

The séance is being held at a crumbling palazzo surrounded by Venice canals. This is the home of former opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly). Rowena hasn’t left the house since the apparent suicide of her daughter Alicia (Rowan Robinson) a year earlier. Surrounded by reminders of Alicia, Rowena is under the care of her religious housekeeper Olga (Camille Cottin) and unstable Dr. Leslie Ferrier (Jamie Dornan). Ferrier’s precocious young son Leopold (Jude Hill) seems to be the house’s only comparatively reasonable resident. (It’s worth noting that Dornan and Hill also played a healthier father and son in Branagh’s award-winning BELFAST.)

The house itself also has an ominous history. It was an orphanage, where the doctors and nurses who were meant to care for the children ran away, locking their charges inside to starve to death. The shades of the wronged little ones are said to still haunt their old home, ready to inflict “the Orphans’ Revenge” upon the unwary, especially doctors and nurses. The house is also accessible only by canals, which means nobody can come or go during a storm.

However, Rowena has opened the place up to live orphans for a jolly Halloween party. The kids (and us) get a shadow puppet history lesson about the place. Then, as the festive trappings are cleared away, Mrs. Reynolds and her assistant Desdemona (Emma Laird) arrive. Also present is Alicia’s ex-fiancé Maxime (Kyle Allen), whom Rowena loathes.

Mrs. Reynolds does seem to know her stuff. Poirot is positive she’s a fake, but less sure how to prove it. Some suitably haunted-house things occur during the séance, with no obvious explanation.

While Poirot is figuring out how Mrs. Reynolds can possibly be faking all of this, there’s a murder. Is it linked to Alicia’s death? Is it linked to the Orphans’ Revenge? Could it be both?

HAUNTING has both advantages and disadvantages over the previous Branagh/Green Christie outings, 2017’s MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS and 2022’s DEATH ON THE NILE. It has the virtue of comparative novelty, since its basis, Christie’s novel HALLOWE’EN PARTY, hasn’t been filmed as often or as famously as its predecessors.

On the other hand, one doesn’t need to be a Christie scholar to know that the author didn’t write about the supernatural. This detracts from the tension that would normally exist between whether we’re dealing with vengeful ghosts or more earthbound killers.

In fact, Green’s script goes further than we might suppose in allowing some hints of the metaphysical to enter the proceedings. This helps both in terms of letting a few of Poirot’s more intuitive deductions seem reasonable, and in allowing the film to resolve the dilemma it sets for its hero at the outset.

As director, Branagh makes the most of the Gothic trappings. There are great production design touches, like masked gondoliers and a serpent-adorned cuckoo clock.

Anybody familiar with the meta aspect of how Poirot stories work will have a generally correct guess about what will happen. The specifics are entertaining and come together in a satisfying puzzle-solution way. Also, Yeoh is a blast as the medium.

But there’s something just slightly off. Part of it may simply be that we’re with Poirot while he’s on a depressive spiral. We get it, but his enervation spreads too easily to us.

Part of it may also be that the back story of a bunch of murdered children tends to put a damper on things. If A HAUNTING IN VENICE were actually a horror movie, or even a darker kind of crime drama, this might work. In an all-star Agatha Christie piece, even Branagh’s directorial assurance can’t wholly bridge the tonal dissonance. We can tell the filmmakers are going for character depth, but they’re up against the required interrogations, flashbacks, confessions and everything else that’s part of the recipe.

A HAUNTING IN VENICE is well-made and broadly fits the mandate of what it’s supposed to be. It’s just not as much fun as its predecessors.

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