A Haunting in Venice (2023)

Belgian master detective Hercule Poirot has retired from the detection biz to become a sad, rich guy with ridiculous facial hair and very specific culinary obsessions in Venice. He’s more than a little depressed, yet also very unwilling to step back into his old life. However when Poirot’s old friend, the writer Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) who based her serial detective on him, drags him out of his new private life to partake in a Halloween séance in the supposedly haunted palazzo of opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), he can’t quite resist.

Poirot very quickly reveals that the medium Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) and her two assistants are frauds, as he expected, but he’s rather more troubled by the murders that, also as expected, happen afterwards. During the course of the night, locked in with a good handful of horrible rich people and the hired help with reasons to hate them, Poirot will have experiences that not only put his own abilities in doubt, but also the rational world view he prides himself on.

Though it certainly is not a spoiler to say that Kenneth Branagh’s third Hercule Poirot film will explain the supernatural away in the end, and will reinstate Poirot’s belief in himself on the way as well. Like Death on the Nile, this film is interested in asking questions about the role of the Great Detective, not so much doubts about his abilities or the use and abuse of a very classically humanist idea of rationality but rather the practical use such abilities and principles should be put to. In Branagh’s view, Poirot’s weakness appears to be the detective’s tendency to drift into that realm of pure rationality where the knowledge gained isn’t tempered by compassion, and where Poirot’s attainment of this knowledge doesn’t actually help anyone. So all three of Branagh’s Poirot films see the man confronted with murders not committed out of reasons of pure evil or greed but as result of human tragedies. The cases thus become not only about the Great Detective’s use of his powers of ratiocination, but about how he learns to use them in the cause of justice more than that of the law.

It’s not a very Agatha Christie approach to the formula, if you ask me. As most writers of traditional crime in the “Golden Age” (ha!) style, she showed little emotional investment in the compassionate approach to human tragedy leading to crime (especially when committed by the lower classes), or really, little interest in the murder mystery as more than a neat puzzle.

Clearly, this is not an approach Branagh is interested in, so Poirot ends this third movie as a man with a degree of moral authority, and a degree of humility that’s based on compassion more than anything else. Like any good superhero, he’s getting back to the business of making the life of others perhaps just a little bit better. To me, that’s a rather more interesting approach than mere puzzle solving, but I’ve been known not to be the greatest fan of Christie and her stylistic sisters and brothers, so others might very well be annoyed by this instead of enthused.

Of course, this also affords Branagh with his acting hat on to actually do something with Poirot beyond the always fun preening. In his context Poirot is allowed to doubt and stumble and actually be involved with the people he has come to judge, an opportunity he certainly doesn’t let pass by. In general, A Haunting in Venice feels very much like a film built to give its whole cast something interesting or fun in their characters to work with, and as is usually the case with films that do, everybody puts effort into mildly theatrical and pretty wonderful performances that bring all these flawed rich arseholes with dark secrets to life.

And because this is a Halloween movie, Branagh the director spends much of the film using every traditional – say from the expressionist era to late 40s Universal with perhaps a little visit to Robert Wise’s The Haunting – visual trick of the spooky trade. The shadows are dark and deep, the light of dubious use for visibility but of the greatest for atmosphere, and there’s hardly a minute going by without a perfectly applied Dutch angle. I’d love to see Branagh try his hand at an actual ghost story in this manner, but I’m perfectly happy with the half of one we get here.

So call me an Branagh Poirot apologist, but I do love this third of the man’s Poirot movies just as much as I did the first two.