★★★☆☆
Asserting that one of 2023’s best horror films stars Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot at first seems like a bit of a dig at the quality of the year’s ghoulish output. But in a year which has given us Talk to Me, Cobweb, Infinity Pool, and Pearl, A Haunting in Venice stands out as a straightforwardly enjoyable 12A spook-fest. As far as introductory horror movies go, you could do a lot worse than this.
A Haunting in Venice is essentially exactly the film the trailer makes you think it is: Poirot solves a murder inside a haunted house. The year is 1947, and Poirot’s old novelist friend Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) drags the detective out of his gondola-adjacent retirement for a puzzle even she can’t solve. A medium (Michelle Yeoh) claims to be communicating with the ghost of a dead child. The child, intriguingly, claims to have been murdered. Oooo and, indeed, err!
With a goldmine of a premise like that, it might seem strange that the Hallowe’en Party novel the film is based on is one Christie’s less popular works. As the plot reaches its conclusion, that reason becomes slightly clearer, but after adapting two of the author’s most well-known mysteries in Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, Branagh’s decision to tackle a hidden gem of sorts feels delightfully refreshing. Nothing improves a whodunnit more than not knowing, er, who’s done it, after all.
Like the other two instalments in Branagh’s Poirot-verse, it’s clear the filmmaker is having a whale of a time – though this time more behind the camera than in front of it. His slightly older, grumpier detective doesn’t quite have the same charmingly eccentric energy of his last outings, but the film more than makes up for it by really, really enjoying being spooky.
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The most impressive thing about A Haunting in Venice is its use of atmosphere, and the tale’s unnervingly damp Venetian setting provides plenty of classic jump scares alongside a delightfully sinister score from Hildur Guðnadóttir. Doors slam of their own accord, windows blow open with sinisterly timed wind, and unexplained supernatural phenomena abound as Poirot starts to question his cast-iron adherence to rationality.
It’s that classic ‘sceptic in a haunted house’ story that makes the film such a satisfying, if unexpected fit for our Belgian detective. Avoiding the standard trilogy-capping ‘it’s his hardest case yet’ narrative in favour of a compelling standalone story, for most of its runtime A Haunting in Venice delivers a joyfully spooky puzzle box that’ll keep you guessing right up to the final chime of a creepy cuckoo clock.
Poirot was sure he’d locked the door when he went to the bathroom (Credit: 20th century studios)
It’s worth noting too that, though Branagh is often branded as a slightly conventional director, here he really gets to show off a bit of his filmmaking flair. Packed with inventive camera placement and a clearly deep understanding of how to build tension through an image, the film winds up being one of the most visually interesting mainstream films we’ve seen this year.
Unfortunately, though Michael Green’s third Poirot script is probably his finest, packed with dry humour and some deliciously barbed dialogue (which Tina Fey proves particularly adept at delivering with suitable relish) the mystery itself is slightly curtailed by the source material, which perhaps explains why Hallowe’en Story never really took off like some of Christie’s other works. Still, there’s enough of the author’s deceptively nasty characters and strong motives that you’re unlikely to leave A Haunting in Venice too dissatisfied.
Coincidentally, the film also arrives in UK cinemas on Agatha Christie’s birthday (15 September). It’s hard to think of a better present than this.
A Haunting in Venice is in cinemas now.
