Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice is set over one night in 1947. World War II has mercifully ended, but peace on the streets of Venice is being interrupted by another kind of invasion: Halloween trick-or-treaters. As the mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) cheekily suggests to her friend, the famed, mustachioed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Branagh), the Americans may have left, but their holiday traditions stayed behind.
Halloween wasn’t invented by the Americans. Nor was the tradition of playing dress-up, or telling scary stories in the dark. And that misleading narrative says something about Ariadne’s predilection for spinning a yarn as much as it does the film’s penchant for easy shortcuts and weak suppositions. At its best, A Haunting in Venice, the third of Branagh’s Agatha Christie adaptations, seductively draws us in with evocative, highly textured period details, but at its worst, it’s frequently undercut by murky storytelling and odd pacing.
Ditching the woeful CGI that plagued his otherwise entertaining Death on the Nile, Branagh opts for a more practical approach here. Bathed in golden light and heavy shadows, A Haunting in Venice’s central location—a labyrinthine old mansion with decaying green wallpaper and walls of old, leather-bound books that you can almost smell—is brought to vivid and ominous life. It’s a potentially haunted house that’s also akin to an escape room.
Which is what it more or less is for Poirot. When we’re reintroduced to the sardonic and unflappable genius, he’s retired and decamped to a stunning, airy atelier in Venice, indulging his passion for horticulture. He seems more or less content but also spends much time avoiding being roped back into the detective game. Until one day Ariadne swings by and insists that he accompany her to a Halloween séance being conducted by Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) at the home of Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), a divorced heiress who’s trying to connect with her late daughter, Alicia (Rowan Robinson), who’s died in bloody and ambiguous circumstances.
Reynolds has amassed something of a following for her exploits, but Ariadne is convinced that her ability to commune with the dead is a lot of hokum. Soon Poirot finds himself in a battle of logic versus the supernatural when the séance appears to cause Reynolds to be possessed by the spirit of the dead child, and himself to be plagued by visions and sounds no one else notices. One mysterious and shocking death later and Poirot is back in action.
It’s an electrifying setup that’s largely squandered. The jump scares are frustratingly telegraphed with molasses-like camera movements and blaring noises, and as such A Haunting in Venice never really rings true as pure horror. And when the mystery of the film is unraveled in its final moments, the eventual conclusions are so harebrained and illogical that the sense of relief or of accomplishment that’s normally associated with mysteries of this kind is ignominiously absent.
Branagh’s greatest strength as a director has always been in giving his actors the space to fully embody their characters, and A Haunting in Venice is no exception. Yeoh is wonderful as the sultry, wise, and possibly supernatural Joyce, and Camille Cottin and Jamie Dornan are surprisingly vulnerable as individuals grappling, respectively, with the determinism of religious absolutism and PTSD. Which makes Fey’s performance all the more bewildering. Indeed, she feels as if she’s wandered in from the set of a lesser comedy, her smarmy half-smile and weak-sauce comedic asides a poor stand-in for relief in an otherwise dusty, dry, and sluggish affair.
In the end, any attempts that A Haunting in Venice makes at connecting post-war trauma to Halloween and the ability to commune with the dead are non-committal, and the script doesn’t do enough to communicate why any of that matters. Mention is made of the belief that the veil between the earthly plane and the spiritual world is thin around Halloween. And because the film is nowhere close to being as evocative as that, it may leave you wishing for Poirot’s next case to be more enticing both in anticipation and actuality. Either that or for him to stay retired.
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