Screenwriter Michael Green and director-star Kenneth Branagh have coaxed another gold-effect egg from that plump goose which is the Agatha Christie estate. Legendary moustachioed Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, played by Branagh, is back for another ensemble outing with many biggish-to-big names phoning it in for the paycheck. This movie appears to be trying for a tougher, nastier, horror-ish feel, perhaps to scoop up some of the younger scary-movie fanbase alongside the Werther’s Original demographic that normally turns out for this kind of thing.
The timeline follows on from the previous Poirot case, Death on the Nile; the year is 1947, and Hercule Poirot is in genial retirement in Venice, where he employs ex-cop Vitale (Riccardo Scamarcio) as his personal bodyguard. But his friend, the bestselling American mystery author Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) is in town. She impishly persuades him to come with her to a Halloween séance being conducted at a nearby palazzo by the famous psychic Mrs Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) – with a view, of course, to debunking her. Horrible events ensue. Could sinister ghostly forces be at work? Well, Poirot takes a refreshingly atheist view and, like the Scooby-Doo gang, believes that supernatural phenomena and non-rational explanations are a diversionary tactic promoted by those with something to hide.
A Haunting in Venice is freely adapted from a late Agatha Christie novel, Hallowe’en Party, from 1969, and does at least look better than its predecessor, which used cheesy digital effects and back-projections to suggest Egypt and the Nile. Now Branagh is going for something creepier and more claustrophobic: the sepulchral interior of the ancient haunted palazzo, cut off from the police launches by stormy weather, much like the snowed-in country houses of old – although Venice connoisseurs may wonder if there might not be a way, in cases like these, of approaching a palazzo from another direction, by land.
With each new Branagh/Poirot movie I have sat down for some guilty-pleasure fun, and he always brings to the part a basic level of sprightly energy. But each time I have been disappointed by the trudging inertia that sets in – and here by the false-ending, fake-reveal moments which the movie just breezes through, and also by the criminal waste of the supporting cast. In particular the waste of comedy genius Fey, who does a sort of tough-talking broad routine but with no real dialogue material to work with. There is, however, a laugh when Poirot solemnly remarks: “You wake the bear from his sleep, you cannot cry when he tangos.” And Fey acidly replies: “That’s not a saying in any language.”
As in Death on the Nile, A Haunting in Venice takes the story at a pretty even pace, and its jump-scare moments, sometimes accompanied by a close-up of Poirot looking dramatically to his left, do not have the investment that an true horror film would have given them, and so feel just like a hiccup. Well, there’s always hope for future Christie movies with less tricksiness: how about political satire The Augean Stables, about Poirot and a dodgy prime minister?
• A Haunting in Venice is released on 14 September in Australia, and on 15 September in the UK and US.
