'A Haunting in Venice' is fine but flawed
The latest in Kenneth Branagh's series of Agatha Christie adaptations has its moments, but falls victim to some dubious filmmaking techniques
Against all odds, one of the most prolific figures of cinema in the last four years has been… Kenneth Branagh. The veteran actor/director has had one of the busiest and most significant stretches of his career while in his early 60s.
Branagh has directed four films in four years: A forgettable Disney+ adaptation of Artemis Fowl in 2020, his Roma-style personal project Belfast in 2021, and two more Agatha Christie adaptations that he's both directed and starred in, 2022's Death on the Nile and the new A Haunting in Venice.
He's also assumed his usual place in Christopher Nolan's casts, playing the main villain in Tenet and a small but memorable role in Oppenheimer. He also played Boris Johnson in a British miniseries called This England that I don't believe was ever released stateside, though I'd really like to see it.
Branagh's directorial efforts of late, however, haven't been nearly as first-rate as his work for Nolan.
Belfast wasn't quite the awards magnet it was envisioned as, although it did earn Branagh his first-ever Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Meanwhile, the Poirot films have been workmanlike but not particularly memorable, with both of Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc movies clearly much better than any of them. And they've only arrived so closely together because Death on the Nile was long-delayed for Armie Hammer-related reasons.
A Haunting in Venice is a bit more interesting plot-wise than Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile, as it adds what may or may not be supernatural and gothic horror elements onto the usual parlor mysteries, and the cast mostly performs well. But where it falls surprisingly short is in the filmmaking department.
The plot, based rather loosely on the 1969 Christie novel “Hallowe'en Party,” finds Poirot retired in the titular city, where he's lured into a seance that's being held in a spooky mansion. The palazzo belongs to an opera singer (Yellowstone's Kelly Reilly) whose daughter is dead and may be haunting the place. On board for the seance is mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey, in a rare dramatic role), a medium (Michelle Yeoh), a doctor and his son (Jamie Dornan and Jude Hill, who also played father and son in Belfast) and Generic Handsome Actor Kyle Allen as the dead woman's former lover.
Things go the way they usually go in these things- people die one by one, suspicion is apportioned, and Poirot eventually gives a long speech explaining exactly what happened and why the guilty party is guilty.
Sure, there are a few more jump scares than you're used to, the inclusion (maybe) of ghosts, and a speech about the liberation of Bergen-Belsen that appears way, way out of place in a movie like this. The performances are all fine, especially Hill — the boy who earned some great notices from Belfast — who at first seems like a creepy kid who likes Edgar Allen Poe but ends up offering some real poignancy. Yeoh, fresh off her Oscar, gets to have some fun, although her appearance is brief.
But what I really didn't like was the film's visual style, consisting of lots of handheld camera work, extreme closeups, and shaky-cam in the handful of action scenes. I get that Branagh and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos were going for a claustrophobic fall, but I didn't think it worked at all. And the film offers not much clarity when it comes to the layout of the mansion and how each room relates to every other.
I'm used to hearing that a lot of recent movies, including Oppenheimer and Branagh's other recent work for Nolan, absolutely have to be seen in IMAX. In Oppenheimer's case, that's certainly true, but A Haunting in Venice might actually play better on a smaller screen.