A Haunting in Venice Film Review

As I suspected this resembles the book (Hallowe'en Party) as much as I do an apple tree. They keep many of the same names of the characters and the murderer is the same, but pretty much everything else has been manically twisted and darkened from the book. They turn it into a horror film (with a few too many jump scares) more than a classic mystery though that too surfaces in the end. In this case though that is a very good thing. The book plodded along as Poirot interviews one person after another before his little gray cells put it together. To a lesser degree Poirot does the same here but the murder has been moved from a small English town to the shadowy medieval world of Venice. And that makes all the difference. Most of the film plays out in an old crumbling Palacio that is rumored to be haunted with the souls of dead orphan children. Shot in dim lighting and claustrophobic angles with creepy art sending a dread chill through the atmosphere. Potential supernatural aspects are injected into the film with a séance and ghosts seen and heard. How much of it is real is something Poirot (Kenneth Branagh - directing again for his third Poirot) has to work through.

Poirot has retired from the detective business and is living the good life in Venice where a gondola delivers pastries to his home twice a day. He has had to hire a bodyguard to fend off all the people who line up outside his building to consult him - even to the point of knocking them into the canals. His peace is broken when an old friend comes to him. She is Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a famous mystery author who has had three book failures in a row. She persuades Poirot to go to a children's Halloween Party at the Palacio of Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) and then attend a séance done by Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh). Oliver wants him to help her prove that she is a fake medium. Rowena wants Mrs. Reynolds to contact her daughter who jumped off the balcony and drowned a few months previously. Attending also are a number of people - some of whom will be witnesses, some victims, some suspects and a murderer.

Poirot begins to wonder if he is going mad with visions and hearing a child singing. In the book it is a young girl drowned bobbing for apples, here it is nearly Poirot and at that point he knows evil and murder is residing in this horrifying mansion. And murder comes quickly. In Murder on the Orient Express, Branagh almost turns Poirot into an action figure; in Death on the Nile, he probes deeply into the psychosis of Poirot - neither very Poirot like - but here he gets him a closer to the books. Lists, method and information. Then let his brain take over. The circumstances are certainly nothing like the books - but the process is the same. What is a bit surprising is they give a really negative slant to Oliver (no, she is not the killer) who has been a friend of Poirot for decades and shown up in a number of his cases - more dotty than manipulative. If I hadn't read the book and watched the Suchet version, I don't expect I would have guessed the murderer. I don't really see how anyone could. Were there clues that I missed? I think I read that Branagh plans on making more of these. That is fine with me. Best is that it ended in time for me to rush to the bathroom which was way too far away. At my age, a close bathroom is essential.