As you may recall, I loved Kenneth Branagh’s first Agatha Christie adaptation, Murder On the Orient Express. Death On the Nile, however … not so much.
I’m happy to report that A Haunting In Venice returns to form in Branagh’s latest installment. While it’s not as good as Murder On the Orient Express, I found it smartly written, expertly filmed, and well acted.
The trailers for this movie were honestly scary. I’m not an avid Agatha Christie reader, but I’m fairly certain her mysteries all have a very real world solution. As I entered this film, I was curious how they would navigate the supposed supernatural element with the source material.
As expected, Branagh found a way to provide plenty of jump scares while ultimately upholding the famed detective Hercule Poirot’s quote: “The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.”
A Haunting In Vince takes place in 1947 and follows retired detective Hercule Poirot as he attends a Halloween séance in Venice. He is there at the behest of a novelist friend, eerily similar to Christie herself in many ways, who asked him to expose a fraudulent medium and confront the mansion’s haunting past. Of course, nothing is simple when Poirot is involved, and so there is a suicide, several murders, and the question of ghosts for him to confront as well.
Branagh, who also directs the film, chose his cast well for this installment of Poirot’s adventures. Tina Fey plays the novelist and has superb chemistry with Branagh while standing toe-to-toe with him. The rest of the cast were somewhat unknown to me, but they all played their roles expertly.
If you love mysteries, I highly recommend A Haunting In Venice as well as Branagh’s other Poirot adaptations. Just keep in mind that Death On the Nile is the weakest of the three due to miscast leads.
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