Once the credits begin to roll on A Haunting in Venice, the newest Kenneth Branagh-directed adaptation of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novels, one might feel they need to summon up a detective to discern why they feel so underwhelmed. There's no noticeable aspect of A Haunting in Venice that's especially "bad" or "incompetent". Most of it's handsomely made and the actors are generally solid. So why does the whole thing feel so inconsequential? Why is something that's so determined to frighten the viewer barely leave a mark? Ultimately, A Haunting in Venice is just too stiff to ever get in touch with its freaky and scary side. Michael Green's screenplay wants to appeal to both the Downton Abbey and Insidious crowd here, but he can't quite nail the balance.
Heavily expanding on a 1969 Christie novel entitled Hallowe'en Party, Poirot is now living out his days in Venice, Italy refusing to take on new mysteries. He's content to just spend his time a loner tending to his garden, but then old pal Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) shows out of the blue. This murder mystery author invites her detective comrade out to a seance occuring on Halloween night at the estate of opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly). Once all the local orphans are done with a Halloween party, Poirot, Oliver, and a gaggle of wildly varying personalities gather around Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), who can apparently communicate with the dead. The goal of this exercise was to contact Drake's deceased daughter. However, a new unexpected murder leads Poirot to reconnect with his detective side to figure out who among the few souls in this palace is a killer. This is complicated by Poirot, who is dubious of anything supernatural, beginning to see strange things centered around dead kids and vengeful spirits.
One strange element of Branagh's version of Poirot is the desire to give this detective lots of tragic backstories. This character not only has a dead wife named Katherine looming over his exploits, but the 2022 film Death on the Nile opened with an explanation set in World War I for the origins of the character's famous facial hair. These attempts to make Poirot "more realistic" or "believable" are always a little baffling, especially since they run counter to the innately and entertainingly heightened nature of murder mystery stories. Once again in A Haunting in Venice, Branagh and Green are too enamored with explanations for Poirot's behavior for their own good. None of the personal drama for the character in this installment is very original or interesting, intimate struggles are just not what the character of Poirot works best with.
More egregious in terms of flaws for A Haunting in Venice, though, is simply the lack of imagination when it comes to scares. There's a heavy reliance on jump scares and discombobulating editing here to bring home the frights, any of which could have been shipped in from separate movies. The best examples of eerie uncertainty come from some wonky camera angles embraced by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos. He also has fun tilting the camera or altering the lighting just enough to make Rowena Drake's lavish decor unnerving once the bodies start dropping. Otherwise, though, A Haunting in Venice isn't very interesting as a horror movie. The mind reels at all the fun or unhinged places a haunted house murder mystery could go to, but Venice is too preoccupied with coming off as "a real movie" to indulge in ridiculous entertainment.
Green's writing also has issues disguising dead giveaways to the real murderer as just ordinary dialogue. Awkward run-on sentences escape the lips of characters with neon signs announcing "remember this later" practically draped over every word. With minimal scares and no real unpredictable mysteries on hand, A Haunting in Venice proves watchable mostly based on its sharp production design and collection of decent actors. The rapport between Jude Hill as an uber-smart kid and Jamie Dornan as this youngster's shell-shocked veteran father is especially interesting. Branagh makes smart use of Hill and Dornan's familiarity with one another after collaborating on Belfast to make a parent/child dynamic that feels deeply lived-in.
Hildur Guðnadóttir's score is also another jewel in this composer's crown, with her various compositions often demonstrating more of a chilling quality and degree of thoughtfulness than anything else in the movie. Even with these commendable qualities, though, A Haunting in Venice registers as largely an average and disposable experience. Too much of the script and direction opts for the obvious rather than the unexpected, resulting in a murder mystery that rarely pulls you to the edge of your seat. There are a lot of pop culture properties out there right now about idiosyncratic sleuths solving crimes. It's a level of ubiquity that would've made Agatha Christie happy. It's best to just catch up on Poker Face or revisit a Benoit Blanc adventure than catch up on the handsomely produced but frustratingly banal A Haunting in Venice.
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