Following her first film – director and former Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh‘s initial dive into Agatha Christie (where he of course casts himself as leading man Hercule Poirot) – Melissa came back this week skipping over that movie made in Egypt and going straight for 2023’s A Haunting In Venice, the third film (of who knows how many may yet come) in the Branagh/Christie series.
Now, Agatha Christie never wrote a book called a A Haunting In Venice, or really much close to it, but the film here is loosely – and that would appear to be a generous term – based on a late Christie novel known as Hallowe’en Party. Basically, a lot of characters have the same names. Outside of that, there’s no particular connection.
Branagh does umpteen Shakespearean adaptations, but when it’s time to do a film in Venice he decides to skip the obvious play to instead re-imagine an unknown story here for no reason
As you can probably divine by the title, our film is set in Venice, which if nothing else is a pretty neat-looking place with evidently a very extensive HOA keeping strict tabs on the architectural aspects of the city. No solar panels being installed here, I’ll tell you! Everybody’s favorite Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot has retired to Venice – retired because he has lost his faith in humanity and Venice presumably because he can. I mean, wouldn’t you?
Tina Feydora
But despite the apparent efforts of his former Italian police officer turned bodyguard Vitale Portfoglio, Poirot is pulled back into his old habits by a old acquaintance of his, Ariadne Oliver, an author who has fictionalized Poirot’s cases and become famous for it. Ariadne, having gotten herself stuck with a serious case of writer’s block, invites Poirot to a séance with the overt intention of having him expose the medium, one Joyce Reynolds, as a fraud – and with the covert intention of fooling Poirot, hoping to glean some ideas to stimulate her writing. Reynolds, it would seem, is a fraud, and Ariadne is in on the deception (at least as far as this particular séance is concerned) – a point the audience and Poirot will only learn later, but spoiling it now makes a bit more sense. Vitale, for his part, is also in on the séance plot – he was actually the officer who failed to solve the Alicia Drake murder a year prior…but we’ll get to that.
Wait, how many if by canal again?
Poirot agrees to expose the charlatan, but the séance can’t happen right away. No, first the Palazzo owned by the spirit-seeking party – which was in a past life an orphanage where many children apparently died and now supposedly haunted by their ghosts – needs to host a large Hallowe’en party for the local Venetian children. The party seems to fulfill two roles – one, it ties the film back to the novel it was allegedly based upon, and two, it provides a reason for the presence of a bobbing-for-apples setup…neither of which were particularly needful. The whole party, then, makes no apparent sense, and I guess that in 1947 some adults with no young children could just throw parties for the neighborhood kids in allegedly haunted former orphanages and their parents would be like, “Hey, let’s send little Giuseppe unaccompanied over to the totally-not-molesters party!” Maybe this was a thing that happened.
The call is coming from inside the house! (No, really, that’s a plot point.)
The woman who owns the orphanage-cum-palazzo and who has organized the séance is Rowena Drake, a former opera singer (aren’t they all?) whose young-adult daughter Alicia died in an apparent suicide a year before. The story goes that Alicia became distraught and eventually suicidal when her fiancé Maxime, a hopeful great chef of Europe, called off the engagement. That story will also turn out to be wrong – indeed Rowena herself (FWIW, no father in sight) is ultimately responsible for her daughter’s death. She did not approve of Maxime and went so far as to poison her daughter with (checks Wiki) Rhododenron Ponticum, which she grew in the rooftop garden (don’t tell the Venice HOA!) in order to keep Alicia too sick to see Maxime, who wished to reunite despite his knowledge of Rowena’s disapproval. The poison was cleverly created by bees kept by Rowena, whose use of the Rhododendron pollen to create their honey infused it with the toxin. The direct cause of Alicia’s death was inadvertent – the maid Olga, who was unaware of the honey plot, unknowingly gave Alicia a fatal dose in her tea. Rowena subsequently threw Alicia’s body into the canal from an upper story to cover up the actual cause of death.
As a side note, Hercule Poirot, too, is apparently fed small doses of the toxic honey during his stay at the palazzo and as such has various hallucinations throughout the course of the investigation which allow the film to try to fool us into the idea that a real haunting is occurring. Kind of a cheap trick, actually.
Yeow!
But we haven’t even gotten to the séance. Rowena, who knows full well that she is responsible for Alicia’s death, wishes to have a séance to contact her – but her real purpose is an attempt to uncover an anonymous blackmailer who apparently knows about the poisoning. The séance is of course fake, and Poirot immediately sniffs out the presence of a Reynolds assistant hiding in the chimney whose radio-operated device allows him to remotely press keys on a typewriter. Whatever. Ariadne’s plot basically fails – but murder must continue. After Poirot, trying to lighten up a bit (he does need to) accepts a mask from the disgraced Joyce Reynolds and decides to wander over and do the whole bobbing-for-apples thing by himself, he is accosted from behind by a disguised figure who attempts to drown him in the bucket, but stops short of killing him. Shortly thereafter, Joyce Reynolds is pushed from a balcony and impaled on a statue. (Both of these acts turn out to be Rowena – she intended to kill Reynolds thinking her to be the blackmailer; Poirot was almost collateral damage due to the mask, but recognized in time as not-Reynolds and allowed to live. How kind. But maybe not smart. If you’re going to go on a murder spree and want to get away with it, best to start with the world-famous murder detective.)
Shylock is actually MORE at home here than Poirot!
At this point, Poirot locks down the guests in the very rococo former orphanage (also, there was a storm preventing them from leaving, and I guess those canals can get pretty choppy – guess the old “rain took the road out” excuse won’t fly in Venice) and sets about solving the murder. Well, murders. The family doctor, Leslie Ferrier, who has not yet overcome his PTSD from being a member of the Bergen-Belsen liberation force, snaps a bit during the whole ordeal, is locked in a room, and then later found to be stabbed in the back. This one? Well, it was compelled suicide. Leslie, also suspected of being the blackmailer, somehow received an in-house call from Rowena wherein she threatened him that she would kill Leslie’s son Leopold if he did not kill himself to make it look like he was murdered. So he held a knife against the wall and leaned into it.
As it turns out, little Leopold himself is the blackmailer, having long ago figured out what his shell-shocked father did not – that Alicia was being poisoned. Poirot figures the whole thing out and confronts Rowena on an upper balcony, where they both seem to see a ghost of Alicia, the fright of which causes Rowena to fall to her death. The End.
This one, well, it follows the classic formula of the Murder Mansion Mystery – diverse characters are brought together into an isolated situation, so that when the murder occurs there is a limited set of suspects, everybody has some sort of hidden agenda, everybody has a motive, who actually did it? (Interestingly, all three of the Branagh/Christie films are Murder Mansion Mysteries, it’s just that in the other two the mansion is either a train or a riverboat.) You know that coming in, or at least you ought to. But something about this film just rubs me wrong. Maybe the plot didn’t quite get it done. The film seemed overly concerned with ambience rather than substance. Poirot was far too unconcerned about being betrayed by his alleged friend. It was tough to care about any of the characters, who were all basically undeveloped – a possible exception being Maxime, who was totally innocent. Orient Express was a useful remake of a classic novel, with a star-studded cast. Death on the Nile was a perhaps less-useful remake of another famous novel, but had sumptuous locations and another star-studded cast. Haunting brought far less to the table – a largely unknown or ill-designed cast (Yeoh is killed early, Tina Fey??), a listless screenplay “adapted” from an unknown novel…I get that remaking already-great productions can be a bit of a rut, but it’s kind of what Branagh does – he takes a great story and makes a faithful adaptation with an eye for the artistic, which is how you get Henry V, and Much Ado, and Hamlet. But give him a chance to do an original story and you get…Dead Again. Unless he wants to take on the Poirot-free And Then There Were None, maybe it’s time for Branagh to hang Agatha Christie up.
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 