Now on Hulu, ‘A Haunting in Venice’ Deserves To Be Watched On Halloween
Chad Collins
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Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice should have been a runaway success when it was released just over a month ago. A twisty, spooky murder mystery adapted from the master of the whodunnit, Agatha Christie, with a cast of known faces, though not too conspicuously known so as to remove the audience from suspending their disbelief? Yes, please. $116 million worldwide isn’t terrible (somehow, these Poirot adaptations keep making money, which isn’t a matter of quality, just befuddlement since no one seems to talk about them), but the third entry in Branagh’s Poirot series should reasonably have done a lot more. Hitting Hulu and digital retailers on October 31 (Halloween!), those who missed it theatrically will finally have a chance to check out not only what is Branagh’s strongest work with Christie’s material, but also one of the season’s best horror movies.
Decades ago, Branagh’s Poirot works would have been a certified hit. Had he stepped into the shoes of Sidney Lumet (Murder on the Orient Express) or John Guillermin (Death on the Nile), helming either feature in some kind of alternative, Branagh universe, they’d have made the kind of money, and generated the kind of interest, the perennially lucrative Agatha Christie material does. Scroll your cable guide right now—on some channel, I can almost guarantee there’s Christie. Last year’s See How They Run sported an original take on the Christie mythos, and stage and screen are replete with adaptations–some faithful, some not– or conspicuous homage (there is no Knives Out without Christie).
Earlier adaptations, especially the remunerative works from the 1970s and 1980s, were more traditional, faithfully recreating the beats of Christie’s written works with an A-list ensemble. They were movies for movie stars, and audiences ate them up religiously (even the cast of Evil Under the Sun, an otherwise B-tier offering, is remarkably golden). In an age where the concept of the movie star is being eroded, Branagh can’t hope to match the sheer level of recognizability earlier iterations wielded to corral audiences into theater seats (Bette Davis on a boat? Yes please), though it’s been a serendipitous boon.
Christie acolytes might scoff at Branagh’s capricious tonal control or take on Poirot’s mustache (ask your dad, he’s probably mad about it), but broadly, they’re some of the best Golden Age homages around. It’s silly celebrities embroiled in silly murders. Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, I’ll concede, aren’t good enough to win over the skeptics, though with A Haunting in Venice (our review here), Branagh is operating metatextually. If you didn’t think he could pull it off before, you almost certainly will now. This is his movie for his skeptics.
A Haunting in Venice loosely (very loosely) adapts Christie’s Hallowe’en Party, a novel Christie herself is reportedly disappointed in. Contemporaneous reception wasn’t kind, and while it’s a personal favorite of mind considering the setting and title, it’s hard even for me to argue that Poirot is anything less than jet-lagged there. The central mystery is haphazardly strung together, and where Christie usually excelled at inviting the audience to piece together the clues themselves, so much of Hallowe’en Party is arbitrary and contrived, it’s nearly impossible to do so without enervating oneself. It’s a laborious work, though one I’ve always recognized as a diamond in the rough. Some polish (and maybe an A-list director having the time of his life) might be enough to make the material sing.
And sing it does in A Haunting in Venice. Branagh’s Poirot, the exhausted Belgian detective still reeling from personal tragedy in Death on the Nile, is browbeaten by friend (and mystery writer) Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) into attending retired opera star Rowena Drake’s (Kelly Reilly) Halloween party. It’s taking place at an ostensibly haunted palazzo, though notably, Ariadne wants more than company. Also in attendance is Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), a famed medium whom Ariadne hopes Poirot can expose as a fraud. And, well, he does, but that’s to be expected. Soon, however, someone is murdered, and Poirot and several other suspicious folk are locked in the palazzo. Ghosts, grief, and murder converge, and by sunrise, Poirot intends to find the killer.
The laundry list of suspects includes Maxime (Kyle Allen), ex-fiancé of Rowena’s deceased daughter and all-around cad. There’s Olga (Camille Cottin), the deeply religious housekeeper and early Westboro acolyte (I’m kidding, but not really). Jamie Dornan’s Dr. Leslie Ferrier is suffering from PTSD, and psychic assistants Nicholas (Ali Khan) and Desdemona (Emma Laird) are hiding secrets all their own. It could be any of them, or all of them (Murder on the Orient Express, anyone), and Branagh, you can imagine, is having a ball giving a surfeit of strong performers an opportunity to monologue and gesture in old-school fashion, hamming it up and toning it down as the evening unfolds.
Everything in A Haunting in Venice is classic horror, a pulp show trading in elegance. The dichotomy permits shifts from earnest explorations of PTSD to signature Dutch angles spotlighting bodies impaled on architecture. It’s an elevated ghost story and a classic haunted house spookshow, and Branagh manages to have his cake and eat it too, unfurling the ever-twisted mystery with style, violence, and shadow-loomed specters to spare. It’s remarkably assured in its excess. Jump scares are employed at every interval. Windows burst open, ghostly silhouettes linger in the background of shots, and doors slam shut on their own. It’s there for pulse and purpose, with Poirot’s night in the palazzo urgently opening his mind to the scares around him as much as it does the audience.
The camera and stylistic, costumed zest never stop moving from one spook to another. It’s like watching an early Roger Corman picture, and it’s all too easy to forget that there’s a murder to solve. You’ll be too busy grinning at the genre iconography, the whiplash in tone, and the surfeit of horror convention, nearly bottomless, Branagh continues to dig through as the bodies pile up, the mystery grows denser, and the ghosts move toward the forefront.
I cannot recommend A Haunting in Venice enough. It’s a genuinely good movie, arguably the first objectively “good” entry in Branagh’s Poirot trilogy there’s been. Its arrival on Hulu this Halloween isn’t just thematic—it’s necessary viewing. Dim the lights, turn up the volume, and let this little mustachioed man and his hunt for ghosts win you over.
Categorized:Editorials
