Hercule Poirot, the world’s greatest and most particular detective, returns in Kenneth Branagh’s third outing as director and star. A Haunting in Venice is set in 1947, 10 years after Poirot solved the case in Death on the Nile (2022).

It is, apparently, inspired by Agatha Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party. Here, however, the English countryside is replaced with the labyrinthine waterways of Venice and the story, while maintaining some similarities, is wildly different.

Poirot (Branagh) has retired for a quiet life, where the only guests he will see are delivering pastries. Of course, he won’t stay retired for long. His old friend, the mystery writer Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), asks Poirot to debunk a psychic medium, Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), whose powers seem too good to be true.

Reynolds leads Poirot to a Halloween party in a decaying and haunted palazzo, which provides the perfect backdrop for a spooky, jump-filled series of incidents. The party is just the starter, and the real event is a seance that is attended by a cast of intriguing characters.

The Poirot fi lm franchise fi nds its footing in the spooky murder mystery A Haunting in Venice, which is a mix between a whodunnit and a ghost story

The faded palazzo belongs to the glamorous opera singer Rowena Drake who recently lost her daughter, Alicia, whom she is hoping to contact. It is believed that, after mental illness — possibly due to a curse connected to the palazzo’s history — Alicia took her own life, throwing herself from her window into the canal below. This theory is quickly dashed during the seance.

In true Agatha Christie fashion, what begins as a case of unmasking a phoney quickly turns into a hunt for a murderer, as the exits are locked and all in attendance come under suspicion. Let me put my cards on the table: I’m a massive Agatha Christie fan, and so are many of my friends. Knowing that this was more “inspired by” than “based on” the book, we made our own predictions about what a tragedy this film would be.

I left the cinema, however, pleasantly surprised.

It is not a straightforward book-to-screen adaptation, as the past two have been. As a film, though, and an instalment in Branagh’s Poirotverse, A Haunting in Venice is strong. It’s beautiful, easy to follow and has a killer cast (pun intended).

A justified murder?

After three films, it seems Branagh is getting used to his character, bringing a level of depth and intrigue that previous adaptations have lacked. His Poirot does unexpected things — from bobbing for apples to breaking down a door — but remains the fussy, conceited character we have come to love.

Yeoh is also formidable, squeezing every possible nuance from her too-small role.

They are joined by a stellar cast, including Kelly Reilly as Rowena Drake and Jamie Dornan and the young Jude Hill, as a retired doctor struggling with PTSD, and his precocious son. None of these are the characters as Christie wrote them. Fans of the books may particularly regret how Ariadne Oliver is presented. In the books, she is essentially Christie’s self-portrait. Here, she is American, and less nice. But Fey who is, frankly, playing Tina Fey — a fast-talking, popular and very canny writer — plays this version of Oliver superbly.

Screenwriter Michael Green, who also adapted Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, has described his own work here as “a murder” of Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party. But, he insists, it was “a justifiable homicide.”

The same soul

The puzzle and the names of characters have stayed the same, but everything else is a pick-and-mix of ideas and references from elsewhere in, and beyond, the Christie canon.

There are nods to other Christie works, including her supernatural short story The Last Séance (1926) and a late Miss Marple novel, Nemesis (1971), which has almost certainly influenced the solution. You could say that the film does stay true to the soul of Christie’s novel, although it is a completely different story.

Christie’s murder mystery, set in the English countryside over several days, focuses on the haunting power of obsession and deals with some of the worst crimes imaginable — the murder and psychological abuse of children. Branagh’s film is pitched as a ghost story and takes place over a single night in a very atmospheric palazzo with a chequered past.

In Venice, the haunting is more literal, but the story is the same — it warns of the destructive nature of obsession and touches on the abuse of children. While A Haunting in Venice is not an Agatha Christie story, it is one that could not exist without her vast and varied body of work. As well as being the supreme mystery writer, Christie had a keen interest in the unexplained, writing several ghost stories throughout her life. But she never blurred the lines between science and the supernatural in the context of detective fiction.

She kept those two interests separate. This film does not. As a result, it struggles sometimes to strike a balance. Is this a ghost story or a detective story? Even at the end, we are never quite sure.

Does this affect our enjoyment? It depends on what you want out of it. If you are looking for an out-and-out scary movie, this one may not be for you. If you are looking for a straightforward whodunit, perhaps look elsewhere. But if you want something in between, it’s right on the money.

But, with the freedom to take on a lesser-known case, Branagh’s Poirot seems finally to have found his footing. While this is also far from a perfect outing, it is a beautifully shot tale of terror that will keep you engaged to the last minute.

The writer is a Visiting Senior Fellow in English and Creative Writing at the University of Suffolk in the UK

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 8st, 2023