A look at A Haunting In Venice (PG)
Kenneth Branagh is back for his third role as Agatha Christie’s famous private detective Hercule Poirot in this murder mystery set in a huge Venice palazzo.
Script writer Michael Green has adapted Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party for this movie but that Christie yarn is not one familiar to this reviewer. The action, including the murders, all unwinds in the early hours of a Venetian morning. After midnight, in fact, in 1949.
Mystery and crime writer Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) pushes a reluctant Poirot into attending a Halloween night séance, hoping the activities will provide her with a plot for another novel.
Her sales have plummeted so she’s hoping Hercule and the guests will produce enough material for another thriller. And boy, oh boy, do they. The medium is Mrs Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) and the theory is that she’ll be able to speak with a young murder victim, Alicia Drake. Alicia’s mother and former opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) owns the palazzo and she’s super keen to find out what happened to her teenager.
Poirot and Ariadne are not the only guests at the séance. There’s a wartime surgeon Leslie Ferrier (Jamie Dornan) and his precocious little son Leopold (Jude Hill) who’s borderline creepy, Rowena’s housekeeper Olga (Camille Cottin) and her former boyfriend (Kyle Allen) along with Mrs Reynolds assistants Desdemona and Nicholas.
World War 2 had ended just four years earlier hence Dr Ferrier’s PTSD which renders him unapproachable at times.
Mrs Reynolds doesn’t get very far into the séance as rats scurry about and those old faithfuls – a face which pops up in a mirror and another face wearing a scary mask – are encountered with only candles to shed any light on the goings-on. Mrs Reynolds falls from a balcony and is skewered to death on a huge sharp pole. She lands face up, but she’s not the only one facing death in this Christie epic.
No one can leave the palazzo as there’s a violent storm lashing Venice and the tied-up gondolas are banging against the side of the building. There’s a couple more deaths looming before Poirot can finally gather all the séance attendees together in a huge sitting room to reveal all.
And after all this, in the early morning daylight Hercule takes in a little breakfast fare with two perfectly aligned and same-sized boiled eggs, on his rooftop terrace.
Oh, and before I forget. The Poirot moustache displayed by Branagh is a tad shorter than in his two previous outings as the little detective. It’s not neat and clipped like TV icon David Suchet’s, but much more acceptable to this reviewer.
And crime writer Ariadne Oliver (played by comedian Tina Fey) is quite a bit more glamorous than the author portrayed in the TV series.
All that said I much preferred Branagh’s Death On The Nile and Murder On The Orient Express to this one.
My verdict: three stars.
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