Kenneth Branagh and Hercule Poirot alike return to form in A Haunting in Venice, the third whodunit in the series based on Agatha Christie’s work. Thanks for this rebound belongs to the twin forces of a horror-tinged new atmosphere and Tina Fey as Poirot’s perfect counterpoint.
Secluded from the world and determined to detect no more, we find Hercule Poirot holed up in Venice, dodging would be clients and navigating life in a precise set of well practiced rituals. But as things tend to go when you’re a world renowned detective, he is soon disrupted by an unexpected visitor from his past. Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) has a talent for storytelling and a wit to match Poirot, but she lacks answers to a local bit of intrigue. And cue trope! Just when he thought he was out, a delicious puzzle pulls him back in.
A crime author, a former detective, sophisticated medium, a bereaved actress and mother, an estranged ex-fiance, a shellshocked doctor and his precocious child, a retired cop, a nun turned housekeeper and the most trauma bonded siblings since the Maximoffs make for strange bedfellows, but nonetheless they assemble for fateful a seance on All Hallow’s Eve. And cue trope! Shit gets weird.
Happily, the weirder it gets, the more Poirot starts to feel like the cocksure sleuth that set the tone for the genre. As he is wont to do, Branagh the director makes some big swings and wacky choices, but they are curiously well suited to the mystery at the center of A Haunting in Venice. Part unraveling local myth, part near past untimely death, part very real and present danger, it’s a whodunit with a bit of phantom flair — and it is likely to keep you guessing even after you think you have everything well sorted.
The little yanks and tugs on the established feel of the series and the genre gives A Haunting in Venice just enough freshness to play, even when it gets a bit wobbly. It’s not elite, but it absolutely is everything we can rightly expect from a dime novel adaptation — it’s fun, fleet and a frisky vehicle for popcorn and a night at the cinema.