A Haunting In Venice review: The mystery is why it’s so dull
Kenneth Branagh’s third outing as Hercule Poirot features Michelle Yeoh, Tina Fey, and Jamie Dornan, but not nearly enough chills
Film Reviews A Haunting in Venice
Agatha Christie adaptations continue to prove popular in several mediums so it’s not surprising that Kenneth Branagh’s version of Christie’s Belgian sleuth, Hercule Poirot, is back for a third go-round. As with his previous two films, A Haunting In Venice is directed by Branagh who also stars as Poirot. And per usual, the ingredients remain the same; there’s a mystery, someone dies, and a plethora of familiar faces from TV and film play the suspects. Familiarity can draw in audiences but sometimes it also can draw their contempt if it’s not what was expected. No problem here; this is more or less exactly like its predecessors. Though it might have proven more successful if Branagh had offered a surprise or two instead of relying on a proven formula.
A Haunting In Venice is based on Christie’s 1969 novel “Hallowe’en Party” and sees Hercule Poirot retired and struggling to fill his days despite being in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Before long he’s pulled back in by a frenemy, the novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey). A writer of mysteries clearly inspired by Christie herself, Oliver invites Poirot to uncover the ways of a medium (Michelle Yeoh) who claims to communicate with the dead. The pair are off to seance at a huge palace on the outskirts of Venice where the bulk of the story takes place. Witchcraft and spiritualism? Perhaps this is not the usual Poirot mystery. No fretting necessary, though. A Haunting In Venice sticks to the tried and true. There’s an assortment of characters, each with a mysterious backstory and hidden motives. Of course someone is murdered and the rest become suspects. These include characters played by Kelly Reilly (TV’s Yellowstone), Jamie Dornan (Fifty Shades Of Grey), Camille Cottin (TV’s Call My Agent) and the kid from Branagh’s Oscar winning Belfast, Jude Hill.
Part of the fun of these films is watching movie stars. Familiar faces with gestures and mannerisms audiences know so well they can tide over a weak script or an easily resolved mystery. The first of Branagh’s movies had bold names like Michelle Pfeiffer, Penelope Cruz, and Willem Dafoe. Even the Christie adaptations of the 1970s featured golden age icons like Bette Davis and Lauren Bacall. But the star wattage has been diminishing with each new Branagh film. In this one, recent Oscar winner Yeoh gets the big star treatment —she’s someone all the characters keep talking about before their grand entrance, then they come out shrouded in darkness with a bait and switch until the famous face appears from the shadows. But after that grand introduction, Yeoh’s hardly in the movie. Fey has a juicier part as Poirot’s nemesis but is only used as a quip-dropping machine, as if she wandered onto this 1940s set from an adjacent one of a contemporary comedy by mistake. And through no fault of theirs, actors like Reilly and Dornan just haven’t yet formed a lasting bond with audiences that would make their mere appearance an event. They give credible performances but nothing that fills the screen with grandeur.
So it’s left to Branagh himself to carry the weight of the film. The director certainly gives the actor lots of room with many close-ups. However with this being his third outing as the character, there’s not that much that can be discovered anew. The script doesn’t offer him—or any of the actors—enough to play with. The whodunnit is easily guessed and the characters are merely archetypes. So everyone resorts to histrionics and overacting as they try to infuse life into this dull affair. Additionally, the nature of such stories calls for long scenes in which characters explain what’s happening, thus sagging the pace of the film. And since neither the characters nor the story are compelling, these scenes end up feeling much longer than they really are.
Visually uninspired, A Haunting In Venice doesn’t take advantage of being set in the titular city with the gorgeous canals. The main setting is a big, dark house that could be anywhere; nothing about it is especially Venetian despite being billed as a “palazzo.” There’s nary an interesting shot. In fact some of the askew angles Branagh and his usual cinematographer, Haris Zambarloukos, use to add a foreboding effect end up being just puzzling. Even the usually reliable composer Hildur Guðnadóttir delivers an unmemorable score.
With mystical elements and a foray into gothic storytelling, A Haunting In Venice could have been much more intriguing. Instead, Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green do not vary much from what they delivered in the other two movies. Perhaps they think they are giving their audience exactly what they want. They should’ve gone for more. Bigger characters, more opulent settings, and a better story overall. That’s what a third outing calls for. Keep serving the same tired old formula and the audience might just stop watching.
68 Comments
Personally I stopped watching about halfway through Branagh’s adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express as it somehow managed to make the source material boring.
Christie adaptations have become comfort viewing for retirement homes…and not just for viewers, but for filmmakers.
Maybe metaphorically, but Branagh at 62 isn’t particularly old as directors go – it wasn’t that long ago when he was the young upstart director shaking up the often tired field of Shakespeare adaptations. But yeah, his Christie adaptations seem awfully rote and uninspired.
Kenneth Branagh makes boring movies!! I mean, I remember really enjoying “Dead Again” uuuuhhh…thirty years ago. But other than that movie, like, everyone must know by now that he makes boring movies.
Dude doesn’t have the right head for Poirot.I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean that literally. Branagh’s got one of the most cuboid noggins around.
It’s possible to make Poirot consistently interesting, as the Suchet adaptations demonstrated. In fact, he was so perfect in the role I’m not sure why anyone else bothers.
I hope he does at least one more, I was really looking forward to another Evil Under the Sun adaption, and I wish he would have done that instead of this. Also, the diminishing returns for a full cast big name stars is hurting these big time – I should be at least excited for this as I was for Glass Onion based on star power alone, shouldn’t I? Even the spoofs made in the same period as the Albert Finney/Peter Ustinov Poirot films, like Murder by Death and Clue have bigger names across the board comparatively than this ho-hum cast of collective owl sounds.
This. When I saw the trailer, my first reaction was: “Tina Fey? That’s the best they could do for casting Ariadne Oliver?”
Olivia Colman was right there.
Olivia Colman was in Murder On The Orient Express, though it was pre-Oscar and she wasn’t considered famous enough to get on the poster!
Well, no—she was probably busy with SECRET WARS.The things people will do to work with Samuel L. Jackson….
And she’d work with my David Mitchell suggestion as she’s worked with him!
And Dave Mitchell has Poirot experience: Plus, he actually looks like zee bloody leetle Belgian!
To be fair the last film got a truly cursed cast including a cannibal and anti vaxer. I think Tina Fey is an improvement on the don’t do anything controversial list by comparison.
Let’s not kid ourselves, but: if her plane went down in the Andes she’d be the first to slice fillets off the pilot’s corpse.
Liz Lemons gotta eat.
They’ll be down for forty-five minutes, the sound of Bolivian Air Force helicopters will be echoing off the mountains and racing towards them, and Tina’ll be there with a shard of signal mirror carving herself some co-pilot porterhouse.
Good God, Lemon!
Wasn’t she a terf?
Not that I’m aware of. If so that’s disappointing. I know Bette Midler did some terfy stuff in recent years but obviously that’s not Tina Fey.
Bette Midler a TERF?!?!?She would’ve been my last guess for that….
I’m not sure if she was full TERF, but I know she’s thrown around the T-slur a bit in the past.
there hasn’t been a good one made yet. How do these keep getting made? Are they really making that much money for all the talent involved?
Does it at least have a sense of place? The boat in the last one never felt like anything physical or defined, and the film really suffered from it. Not just that, but it felt like such an amateur error
COVID protocols, MosquitoControl. The boat scenes were almost all green screen, as were many group shots….
That’s easily the biggest problem with Branagh’s Death on the Nile – the Nile vistas are not remotely convincing and the whole thing feels very fake as a result. I actually think the changes to the tone of DOTN are quite interesting, ramping up the critique of Poirot himself, but ultimately I don’t think it works as well as either the Ustinov or Suchet versions.At least Venice now looks broadly like it did 70 or 80 years ago so no egregious CGI should be needed. It’s also a mystery that hasn’t been told many times, so I’m quite looking forward to this.
My understanding is they took the plot of a separate Christie story about a seance, parts of the Poirot story Halloween Party (which isn’t even considered one of her better stories) and at a point I’m not even fully sure why bother.
Hallowe’en Party has some good elements—one of its pleasures, of all things, is all the discussions of quarry gardens—but it’s one of the last novels she wrote, and Christie is really showing her age (79): the plot recycles elements of earlier mysteries, it is full of complaints about how things aren’t like the good old days, and it—more perhaps than any of the other books, even the ones written still later—shows signs of Christie’s incipient dementia (and poor editing by her publisher), with bits of conversation repeated almost verbatim in different chapters.
Yeah it doesn’t rank high on a list of Christie books you’d want to adapt. I would have gone with the ABC Murders personally.
I’d go with The Sittaford Mystery, which is fun (a séance and a bunch of people snowed in in an isolated house, Mouse Trap-style), has a clever, elegant solution, and hasn’t been done to death in multiple adaptations.
Or The Murder of Roger Aykroyd. That would be a great one for the screen, if you could nail the casting of of Dr. Sheppard.
Ahhhhh that’s a really solid choice yeah I second Roger Aykroyd.
The trouble with adapting Roger Ackroyd is the final twist, as written, can’t possibly work in a visual medium.
Yeah, the Suchet adaptation of Roger Ackroyd struggled because they couldn’t do the final twist as written. (It ends with a manhunt in a chemical factory, of all things.) The stage adaptation was not a success either.
And I think that without that twist, it’s not one of Christie’s better mysteries, and definitely not very cinematic. I would also add that the method of faking the alibi is dated and unconvincing—I think audiences would find it unfair because we know it wouldn’t actually work.
I’d change the name to The Murder of Dan Aykroyd for the stunt-casting possibilities.
Pretty sure they did this one on tv recently with David Suchet
There was a recent adaptation with John Malkovich. Who, it must be said, was a better Poirot than Branagh.
I wasn’t aware of this I must seek it out. Finney is still my favorite FILM version of Poirot.
Hallowe’en Party is one of the funner Christie’s (in my opinion of course). I always read it around October.I also love that it illustrates how utterly unsentimental she was about children.
Wow, this is the first review I’ve seen that doesn’t think this is the best of the three by some distance..
The mystery is why it’s so dullIs it, though? The first two were dull (TBF, I only watched the first one, but from everything I heard, Nile was equally tepid), so why wouldn’t this one be?The mystery, rather, is what makes these movies profitable enough that they keep getting made—especially when there are better adaptations for people to watch, and when Poirot is better suited to couch viewing than to the cinema.
Death on the Nile wasn’t just equally as boring/bad as Orient Express. It was way worse. It was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in terms of plot construction and direction. My mother is a very uncritical consumer of pop culture—she likes everything and says everything is “good.” Even she finished Death on the Nile and said it was terrible. It is truly a mystery why these movies keep getting made, and why Branagh can’t figure out how to make them better. He’s been a competent filmmaker in the past. How is he bungling this so badly so many times in a row?
Dont forget the elaborate mustache backstory opening.
I wish I could forget the mustache backstory.
Honestly just a few minutes of the opening of Death on the Nile was enough, I knew…nah. I thought Murder on the Orient Express was pretty bad, honestly.
In late, but I had to echo this: I dozed off during Nile and my wife asked me if I wanted her to back up so I could see what I missed. I literally said “Nah, I’m good” and apparently was asleep again 10 minutes later.
I was floored to see this exists. Who is going to these movies? Why? There are so many good murder mysteries in the world between TV and film, many of them Christie adaptations. Is it just the celeb appeal? Because Branagh is the most boring Poirot ever.
They should cast David Mitchell – his Poirot parody in his sketches (“I know when I have got zem when zey start doing ze evil voice”) is 10x better than Branagh’s version.
Now that you mention it, Hugh Grant does a flawless Poirot in Paddington 02.
I am 110% ready for Mitchell (and/or Webb) to break over to America, so yes!
Mythagoras, you said it yourself—these Christie adaptations are enjoyable couch viewing. They’re made with the idea of an initial theatrical release to draw in some initial money and prestige (because among older viewers, a movie with a theatrical release still means more than a direct-to-streaming one), but I’d be very surprised if this movie (estimated production budget $70M) wasn’t already profitable even before its theatrical release just from streaming licenses. The movie was released by 20th Century Fox, and produced by Kinberg Genre, Scott Free and TSG Entertainment (which produced all the previous Poirot entries as well as the Fox Marvel X-MEN and DEADPOOL projects). While it’s possible Disney+ gets the streaming rights in the U.S., it’s equally possible that it has streaming deals in place prior to the Disney takeover….
*shrug* I enjoyed them both, although Death on the Nile less than MotOE.
I think the reason they are profitable is they seem to be fairly low cost. It’s also why there aren’t more ‘grand’ visuals…like more shots of Venice, etc…and why Death on the Nile was so tepid compared to Ustinov’s (which had spectacular visuals of various Egyptian sites…now all but impossible to shoot in anything other than CGI due to development and crowds). It costs a lot of money to shut down historic locations, and ‘dress them’ to be period correct, or to build huge sets. But CGI-ing the heck out of everything in a dark warehouse and sticking with interior shots with fairly cheaply built sets isn’t hugely expensive.I shudder to think what it would cost to make shot-for-shot remakes of the Ustinov Poirots ‘Evil Under the Sun’ and ‘Death on the Nile’…no way would they be profitable, but they’d likely be better movies than these have been. Plus, Branagh is a fine Poirot-alike, but he is no David Suchet…who IS Poirot. (I love Ustinov, but he was never quite the ‘strange little Belgian’ as Christie wrote him…close but not quite)
Michelle Yeoh still sounds like she can barely speak English. I don’t mean the accent, I mean she actually sounds like she doesn’t understand the meaning of her lines, like she’s reading cue cards phonetically.
Weird that this sounds so boring. Hallowe’en Party is one of the more lurid (and also fun) Poirots. It sounds like they changed practically every aspect of the story though, so who knows?
I am of a certain age.It’s funny, in 1974 we got Finney and co. in Murder on the Orient Express (which I adore); then Death on the Nile (78) and Evil Under the Sun (82) with Ustinov…which I really enjoy; and after that Appointment with Death (88), which feels like a major drop-off from the formula/casting. Fast-forward a few decades: Branagh’s Murder felt so glossy and unnecessary, as if the point were not to tell a story (one I was so familiar with there was no way it would surprise me) but to show off a big-name cast in period clothes, all twirling mustaches and clutching pearls. His Nile was even worse, and I can’t imagine this would have been any better. BUT, I don’t know the source story on this one, so I’m hoping at the very least, it will seem fresh (?) to me. I like a certain brand of murder mysteries, what can I say.I just wish if filmmakers are going to the trough, they’d take on something that hasn’t been done before (and I mean that specific to the source material and to the very familiar method).
Either it stars Peter Ustinov or you can forget about it.
“Agatha Christie adaptations continue to prove popular in several mediums”.The plural of medium is media. I would think that maybe a, you know, media company might know this.
Under Herb, the death-spiraling G/O would love to return to the days of being a medium company.
There should be a Medium Website for Medium people. Unfortunately, the AV Club is increasingly just the Bad Website.
HA! I just had this conversation about media/medium (though in the reverse – he used the “media” as the singular) on the weekend!
Thing is, this one is getting by far the best reviews of the three. I did not like the trailer, and knowing the story it is obvious they changed a LOT. But still, seems like most reviewers think it is a distinct improvement.
she’s someone all the characters keep talking about before their grand entrance, then they come out shrouded in darkness with a bait and switch until the famous face appears from the shadowstrying to parse the pronoun usage in this sentence has broken my brain.
This review is rough to read. I reread this “sentence” five times before moving on: Familiar faces with gestures and mannerisms audiences know so well they can tide over a weak script or an easily resolved mystery.
i, for one, welcome our chatgpt overlords.
i do like that he keeps making these movies for noone in particular.
What are you talking about?! These films are being made for a very interested audience – Hospital waiting rooms, Airplanes, the DMV and prison recreational time.
“she’s someone all the characters keep talking about before their grand entrance”So, she’s Poochie?