A Haunting in Venice

Director: Kenneth Branagh (USA, UK, Italy). Year of Release: 2023

1947, Venice, Italy (just in case you were thinking that the canals we are looking at belong to a different Venice). It’s the end of October and Halowe’en is approaching. Hercule Poirot is enjoying his retirement but not the queue of people who are still pestering him to solve one last case. To this end, he has employed an ex-policeman to ward his pursuers off and if they don’t get the message, to push them into a canal.

As Poirot settles down to a cake at home, in rushes Ariadne Oliver, a best-selling novelist who has made her fame writing detective fiction based on Poirot’s cases. Well, I say best-selling. Her first 27 books sold well, but the last three have tanked. In search of inspiration, she invites Poirot to a séance. The psychic medium. Mrs Reynolds. has convinced everyone that she’s for real, and Ariadne wants to write a book about Poirot proving her wrong. Or right, she doesn’t really mind.

Did I mention the film is set in Venice? This means that every time there’s a pause in the action, we cut away to a shot of a happy gondolier. But this is a Venice which is almost entirely devoid of Italians. Even the pre-seance party for local orphans is conducted entirely in English. And, apart from Poirot’s bodyguard cop, the attendees of the séance are pretty much exclusively ex-pat bourgeoises whose only contact with the local culture lies in scolding their serving maid.

We gradually get to introduced to the party. There’s Rowena, an opera singer, whose daughter Alicia apparently committed suicide in this very building a year before (or did she?). There’s the family doctor who treated the girl, an ex-soldier who was part of the liberation of Belsen. He has PTSD and is barely functional. He is accomapnied by his son, who looks like a mini Jacob Rees-Mogg. Dressed in a suit, he refuses to mix with the local kids, preferring to read Edgar Allan Poe.

Then there are Mrs Reynold’s helpers – Romanian half-siblings who look neither Romanian nor siblings – they share neither hair nor skin colour. They is joined by Alicia’s former fiancé, who is there because he got a typewritten invitation. Or something. To be honest, none of the characters is well rounded enough for us to care much about them to to distinguish between who they all are. They all have vague motives for killing someone, but exist mainly as background noise.

There is a lot of excited build up to the spiritualist who is so convincing that even the great Hercule Poirot won’t be able to prove that she’s a con artist. It then takes him less than 5 minutes to prove that she’s a con artist, which is somewhat deflating and makes you wonder what all the fuss was about. Well, there is the little bit of Poirot seeing visions of a dead girl, but this is barely mentioned again until it receives a curt “then I woke up and it was all a dream” kind of explanation.

Speaking of dead people, three people die in or in the run up to the film, all in suspicious circumstances. I guess these deaths are the centre of the murder mystery. So it’s a shame that one death is trivially obvious, and one is so convoluted that it reminds you the Neil Simon satire Murder By Death where the author introduces a series of improbable reasons for the killing that the audience could not possibly have known about.

The third death – of a man who is apparently murdered inside a locked room . could have been interesting if it had been given space to breathe, but there’s so much other Stuff going on that you barely have chance to think about it. It’s almost as if all the “look at me” frenetic camera work, unnecessary close ups and shots of Venetian canals were all there to prevent us from noticing that there’s really isn’t much of a plot to speak of.

A Haunting in Venice is “based on” Agatha Christie’s Halowe’en Party, but of course it isn’t, not really. Notwithstanding her various faults, Christie was able to build a story and to offer plausible possible resolutions, keeping us on tenterhooks until we found out who actually dun what. Maybe it’s just me (but a horde of negative reviews suggest otherwise) but whereas I care about how a Christie novel ends up, I felt absolutely no skin in this game.

It’s not just that they’re all poshoes – Christie’s books were hardly populated by a melting pot of the industrial working class. It’s that they are characterless poshoes who are indistinguishable from one another. Yes, some of them have temporary cash problems – how on earth are we going to maintain our huge ex-Pat home and retinue of servants? – but nothing that they did or said evoked the slightest bit of empathy from me.

And then there’s Poirot. In the books (and in the David Suchet tv series), Poirot is a vain, ridiculous man. In this film, there is the occasional hint that Poirot might be slightly pompous. The best line goes against this general rule. When Poirot says “You wake the bear from his sleep, you cannot cry when he tangos.” , Ariane responds “That’s not a saying in any language.” But Poirot never looks ridiculous for more than a moment. Always mistrust a film where the director is also the lead actor.

I left the cinema not really sure what the point was in what I’d just seen. There were occasionally attempts to confront Big Issues, like Poirot’s loss of faith after two world wars, but then the swirling cameras rturned. It’s as if the film did not know what to do with the issues that it had raised, Most importantly, it wasn’t sure whether it was a melodrama a horror film or just a pretty portrait of Venice. So it ended up doing all these things, but none of them with sufficient inspiration.