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.

Eli (2019)

Warning: I’m going to spoil the devil out of the final act twist!

Rose (Kelly Reilly) and Paul (Max Martini) have clearly grown desperate about the rather peculiar auto-immune disease of their little son Eli (Charlie Shotwell). That at least seems to be the only rational explanation for their decision to pack him, his little bubble boy tent and his little hazmat suit, and take him to the very special clinic of what we can only assume (because the film certainly isn’t saying) to be rogue immunologist Dr Horn (Lili Taylor). “Rogue”, because what proper clinic would be an old creepy mansion out in the boons, staffed only by the doctor and two nurses and only ever keeping one patient at a time. Once the treatments start and Eli looks increasingly worse for wear, one also can’t help but ask oneself if one shouldn’t replace the “rogue immunologist” simply with “mad scientist”.

When he’s not getting tortured by the good doctor, Eli does encounter various strangenesses. For one there’s the sarcastic girl (Sadie Sink overacting for all she is worth) outside he has regular chats with through a closed terrace door, and who seems to hint at something not being quite right at the clinic. Worse than mockery, however, are the ghosts. At first, Eli believes these entities want to do him harm, but as he will eventually discover, they are the spirits of Horn’s former patients, all deceased thanks to her treatments, attempting to warn him and help him escape.

The problem is that his parents are more or less in on the dangers of the whole affair – his dad more so than his mum – but then, and here comes the plot twist, Eli is  not actually there to be treated for an auto-immune disease, but because he’s a son of the devil. I’m not speaking metaphorically here, mumsy really banged the devil. Of course, “Doctor” Horn and her nurses aren’t medical people either, but what I can only assume to be renegade nuns – child murder not generally being a terribly accepted part of Christian doctrine – pumping him full of Holy Water in the hopes that it cures him or kills him and saves his soul.

When Eli figures this nonsense out, he gets a bit angry, so I hope you like the idea of a hilarious/dramatic confrontation between mother and son that’s surrounded by a little circle of floating, upside-down (because SATAN) crucified nuns who will of course eventually catch fire.

Now, if you’re asking yourself if Ciaran Foy’s Made-for-Netflix horror movie really is quite as stupid as all of this sounds, I can assure you that yes, it indeed is. On a technical level, Foy is a perfectly capable director, but he is not able (or not willing) to turn the film into the sort of dream-like phantasmagoria needed to make a plot quite this dumb and contrived work. Instead, much of the film is spent on the usual contemporary mainstream horror business of jump scares and people creeping through badly lit corridors.

The film’s structure doesn’t help make up for its dubious big idea either, for the reliance on the one big twist does mean that everything that comes before looks and feels terribly implausible. Neither Eli’s illness, nor the way his parents treat him, nor Horn’s therapy make sense as anything but either a writerly inability to understand the basics of reality or the long, long wind-up to a Big Twist. Alas not in any way that might intrigue a viewer; it’s rather like having to listen to a storyteller who never comes to the frigging point, instead dragging things out endlessly.


Of course, once the point came, I did find myself surprised by its extravagant stupidity as well as by the filmmakers’ apparent conviction that this nonsense somehow makes up for their film feeling patently ridiculous throughout. Foy, despite a soundtrack that becomes increasingly (one might say desperately) dramatic and actors giving their all melodramatically pulling their hair out, simply can’t sell any of it, playing as highly shocking and horrifying what actually comes out schlocky and intensely hilarious.

Bastille Day (2016)

American pickpocket in Paris Michael Mason (Richard Madden) steals the wrong bag when he takes one belonging to Zoe Naville (Charlotte Le Bon), for Zoe’s bag contained a time bomb she was just about to wander off with and throw into the Seine. Initially, she was supposed to deposit it in the office of a racist French nationalist party the film is too polite to name but when she realized said office wouldn’t be empty as promised by the boyfriend who convinced her of the whole thing, she changed her plans.

Michael’s inadvertent intervention ends with four dead bodies, an anonymous message that promises more violence of this sort to come on Bastille Day, and him hunted as the responsible party. Before the French can identify him, the CIA does. And because this is the CIA, they don’t give this rather important information to their allies  – because then they’d have to explain why they have access to surveillance cameras all over Paris – but send out reckless, violent, and nearly disgraced agent Briar (Idris Elba) to illegally detain Michael for a day to torture as much information out of him as possible. Briar might be a bit of a thug, but he’s also not stupid, and he quickly realizes that Michael isn’t responsible for any bombings. In fact, the whole thing will start to look to him like something quite different from terrorism and  only the beginning of a series of provocations set to use the fissures in French society to throw Paris into chaos for rather more petty reasons. Briar, once he’s got a whiff of what’s really going on, will stop at little to get to the truth and the people responsible, even if it means teaming up with a pickpocket and a woman who nearly did something deeply stupid and most certainly highly illegal.

I found James Watkins’s Bastille Day a surprisingly fun film. I’m generally quite sceptical about the slow but steady trickle of international productions seemingly following the lead of Luc Besson’s Europacorp in style and content. However unlike quite a few of these films as well as much of the actual Europacorp output, this one’s actually a neat little addition to the action and thriller genres.

It is even not completely stupid. Sure, the film’s attempt to include the influence of social media and the spread of information as parts of its plot is an interesting idea not very intelligently realized, and the bad guys’ plan has certain shades of the first Die Hard movie with Paris as the skyscraper, and obviously never reads as something that would actually work this way exactly the way they want it, given its dependence of large masses of people acting exactly like they want thanks to the magical power of hashtags, a mysterious Internet thing I’m not terribly sure the scriptwriters have actually encountered in the wild. However, as action movie background guff needed to get the violence and the chases rolling goes, this passes muster quite decently. And hey, while this isn’t a meditation about the worst sides of online culture trickling into the real world, or a film that has something clever to say about mass manipulation, the film’s background is rather more interesting than the usual “Idris Elba shoots the evil terrorists”, and at least tries to use elements of the real world. There’s also the little fact that the film uses its implausible plot with an impeccable sense for the kind of rhythm – which is what the thriller genre, with an emphasis on action like this one has or not, is all about - this sort of thing is supposed to have.

Watkins again turns in a not terribly charismatic but effective direction job, generally following the philosophy that action films are supposed to be edited in a way that enables the audience to follow what’s going on in them and doing a good job with that. The action isn’t exactly realistic in feel but also not terribly over the top, aiming for a middle of the road approach that works quite well for the film.

Idris Elba is an actor you could actually imagine to be physically capable of the stuff he’s doing here. Elba doesn’t, of course and alas, need to strain his considerable acting talents here much, for Briar is a pretty empty vessel; the film doesn’t even make much use of the mistake that brought him to Paris nor does it ever show any interest in explaining who its protagonist actually is apart from slightly insane and exceedingly violent. So all Elba has to go on is his physical presence, which is fortunately also considerable.

All in all, this is bread and butter action thriller stuff done right, even though it’s certainly not a classic of the genre.