A Haunting in Venice (Branagh, 2023)
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed A Haunting in Venice.
Perhaps I should not have been. Yes, the trailer played up the Halloween connection and made it look more like a horror movie than a typical Agatha Christie whodunit. In fact, it wasn’t even until late in the preview that I realized it was a Hercule Poirot story. Perhaps the tame reviews for Death on the Nile (just barely over the 60% line required for a “fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes) made the studio nervous.
It turns out that I may be the ideal audience for such a project — someone who is moderately fatigued with superhero movies and summer action flicks, familiar with the character and genre being depicted, but not so invested that I am angered by deviations from the source material.
I am also, I realized watching the film, an unapologetic Kenneth Branagh fan. Branagh’s turn towards directing and his participation in franchises like Harry Potter and Jack Ryan made it easy to forget just how good he is. (When it comes to Shakespeare, I’ll take him over Olivier any day of the week and twice on Sundays.) He is hardly the first actor to shine on both stage and screen, but I marvel at the way he instinctively appears to understand the differing demands of each medium. Film magnifies everything, so less is more. And with a character like Hercule Poirot, more can mean the difference between character and caricature. Branagh brings depth and nuance to a fairly stock character, and he does so by highlighting Poirot’s anger and sadness rather than merely his ego and intellect.
Since he too is an actor, it is not surprising that Branagh the director gets great performances from other actors. Tina Fey seems as excited to have a non-Liz Lemon role as I was to see her in one. Jamie Dornan makes you forget to ask, “Hey wasn’t he in that 30 Shades of S&M movie?” Kelly Reilly, so very, very good in Calvary and Yellowstone brings just the right amount of edge to what I would argue is the most difficult of the roles. When the reigning Oscar winner (Michelle Yeoh) is fifth or sixth on your list of favorite performances, you know the ensemble is clicking.
Beyond all that, though, the script smartly uses the debunk-the-seance setting for a surprisingly effective and poignant take on the faith vs. intellect conflict. Poirot wants to believe, but he is angered at those who he thinks prey upon a natural human desire to hope. This tension creates an internal as well as an external conflict, and Branagh’s understated performance somehow made Poirot’s conflict land so much more powerfully than a more expressive one would.
A Haunting in Venice is hardly revolutionary, but it left me wanting more Hercule Poirot movies. I am familiar with the argument that rising theater prices and the ubiquity of streaming content mean people will only go to the theater for so-called event movies, but I worry that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those tend to be the only things that get me to the theater these days because they are the only things playing in the theater these days.
It was nice, I thought, leaving the theater, to see a movie content with entertaining me rather than one that always tried to blow me away. A Haunting in Venice is the perfect palette cleanser in between the popcorn movies of Summer and heavy dramas of the late Fall award season.
