Boo-Who-dunit – Kenneth Branagh Sinks A Haunting in Venice

By Elias Savada.

Not the charm you might be hoping for, unless you’re a fan of endless rain, too many jump scares, unsettling camera angles, ragged hand-held camerawork, onerous close-ups, and a score drowning in dreary woodwinds and screechy violins.”

Those actor-ensemble, murder mystery set pieces you’ve experienced in movie theatres over the last several years, in particular those featuring Agatha Christie’s mustachioed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot – entertaining light fare including Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and last year’s Death on the Nile – have another installment, courtesy of actor-director-producer Kenneth Branagh back for the third time, in front of and behind the camera. This go-round, it’s a darker affair, where lots of old-fashioned hijinks are delivered with some unsettling doses of supernatural thrills, crafted into a well-designed, albeit dimly lit, post-World War II period package around the screenplay by Michael Green (Logan), adapting one of Christie’s lesser-known volumes, Hallowe’en Party. After that novel was transformed into a 2006 radio play, a 2008 graphic novel, and an episode of Masterpiece Mystery – for those of you who might recognize the breadth and depth of this thin slice from the Queen of Mystery – it now morphs onto the big screen with a few big stars and some recognizable faces – with maybe a few ghosts and spirits along for the sleight-of-hand ride.

And yet… the third time is not the charm you might be hoping for, unless you’re a fan of endless rain, too many jump scares, unsettling camera angles, ragged hand-held camerawork, onerous close-ups, and a score drowning in dreary woodwinds and screechy violins. The music is by Hildur Gudnadøttir, the Icelandic composer who won an Oscar® and Golden Globe® for his work on Joker. And speaking of that film, in certain scenes featuring Branagh with his oversized mustache, I could have sworn I saw Joaquin Phoenix’s horrifying smile adrift in the murky shadows.

Literary devoid of humor – Tiny Fey has one toss-away zinger about nuns that is lost under the heavy burden of the script – the film covers barely a day in 1947 Venice, its canals about to be deluged with Halloween day rains that add to the misery of a purported haunted house that becomes the movie’s damp centerpiece.

Now, some viewers might like the ghostly rumble creeping up their butts (that’s how it felt at the IMAX screening I attended), but Haris Zambarloukos also dialed the lumens down so low for effect that it’s hard to fully admire production designer John Paul Kelly’s Venetian palazzo to any extent. Or for the few daylight shots at the film’s start that will provide much reason to venture to the eponymous city in future travels. Sure, it’s still a detective story, but it also feels like a demo reel Branagh made for Blumhouse, the production entity known for its horror output.

I dunno, but Branagh might want to head back to more personal projects, like 2021’s Belfast, or stick to the thespian side of life – even if they are smallish ones. He was quite memorable as Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr in Oppenheimer. His directorial flair seems to be waning.

As for the story, Poirot is in retirement mode as the film starts – conveniently also in Venice – when he’s visited by acquaintance Ariadne Oliver (Fey), a stand-in for Christie herself, as a renowned mystery writer, yet one that has not had much success in her recent efforts. She finagles him to row along to a séance in the relic of a mansion owned by opera singer Rowena Drake (Yellowstone’s Kelly Reilly). It’s a year after the apparent suicide of the diva’s daughter, Alicia (Rowan Robinson), and the gathering includes a dubious medium (Michelle Yeoh), the family doctor, Leslie Ferrier (Jamie Dornan) and his smart-as-a-whip, bespectacled son, Leopold (Jude Hill, who also played son to Dornan’s character in Belfast), often shown reading Edgar Allen Poe. Other suspects pop up, including the pompous Maxine Gerard, a New York chef once engaged to Alicia.

Sounds like the story should work, with the mix of characters, but the film runs afoul of the usual Christie greatest and settles for a largely gothic horror outing. A Haunting in Venice is a weary boodunit.

Elias Savada is a movie copyright researcher, critic, craft beer geek, and avid genealogist based in Bethesda, Maryland. He helps program the Spooky Movie International Movie Film Festival, and previously reviewed for Film Threat and Nitrate Online. He is an executive producer of the horror film German Angst and the documentary Nuts! He co-authored, with David J. Skal, Dark Carnival: the Secret World of Tod Browning (a revised edition will be published by Centipede Press).