Heard this one before? A detective, a mystery writer and a medium walk into a Halloween party — who’ll come out the winner?
The rest of the party include a soprano, a doctor, a nun, a chef, a bodyguard and a very serious little boy. This is the setup for Kenneth Branagh’s “A Hauntin
The rest of the party include a soprano, a doctor, a nun, a chef, a bodyguard and a very serious little boy. This is the setup for Kenneth Branagh’s “A Hauntin
Walsh
g in Venice,” loosely based on Agatha Christie’s 1969 novel “Hallowe’en Party.”
It’s Branagh’s third outing as the prodigiously mustachioed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, in the trilogy of Christie adaptations he also directs. It’s 1947, 10 years after “Death on the Nile,” and Poirot has sunk into an easy retirement in Venice, Italy, with a bodyguard (Riccardo Scamarcio), a former policeman, to shoo away the locals clamoring for his detecting skills.
There’s only one person who can get past his guard, and that’s the fast-talking authoress Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey, in full gal Friday mode), who talks him into attending a seance after a children’s Halloween party.
The host is the soprano, Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), mourning the loss of her daughter Alicia (Rowan Robinson), who plunged to her watery death in the canal just one year ago. She has invited a medium, a Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) to contact her daughter at this event.
Ariadne has brought Poirot to debunk the medium, Poirot has brought his bodyguard and also in attendance are the nervous Dr. Ferrier (Jamie Dornan) and his son Leopold (Jude Hill), the nun-turned-housekeeper Olga (Camille Cottin) and Alicia’s former fiance, Maxime (Kyle Allen), a hotheaded chef.
As is customary in a Poirot mystery, a dead body turns up and the detective confines everyone in the house in order to come up with a rational explanation, which is scoffed at in this spiritualist setting. Poirot may be all business, but Branagh’s approach to the film’s style here is wildly daring.
Though Venice initially presents a lovely neo-realist scene, with teal canal waters and charming bridges, inside Rowena’s home, “A Haunting in Venice” is a decidedly waterlogged affair, a queer and queasy acid-laced Hammer horror film, Gothic scene. Aquamarine wallpaper stretches endlessly across walls and ceilings, giving the sense that everything is underwater. Wide-angle lenses stretch into fish-eye views, and there isn’t a high, low or Dutch angle that Branagh and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos don’t exploit.
It’s a vertiginous and intoxicating aesthetic, evoking the eerie, uncanny quality of the setting, never looking anyone right in the eye, but it is also distancing and agitating.
Lucy Donaldson’s edit is jagged, jumpy and erratic, resisting an easy rhythm. Of course, as in all Poirot mysteries, there is a reason for everything, and all will be revealed. Sorrow itself seems to drip down these walls, as “A Haunting in Venice” becomes a reckoning with what it means to be in such close relationship to death.
Screenwriter Michael Green has transposed “Hallowe’en Party” from an English village to the iconic Italian city, just two years after the end of World War II. The quotidian rhythms of life are fragile, tentative. Death looms like a specter in all of their histories, not just Rowena’s. Poirot’s wartime backstory, explained in “Death on the Nile,” drives his fastidious musings; it satisfies him to put everything in its place after experiencing bloody chaos in the trenches.
Mrs. Reynolds knows it all too well, having been a wartime nurse, and she eyeballs Poirot knowingly, informing him that they’re not so different after all, that they share the same burden as psychic and detective, to be the one person who people go to for answers after a loved one dies. Dr. Ferrier is also a veteran, ridden with “war neurosis” or “battle fatigue”; he’s haunted by the sights he saw liberating the concentration camps. Mrs. Reynolds’ assistant Desdemona (Emma Laird) hid in the Hungarian forest; now she dreams only of the utopia that is Missouri, having watched half of “Meet Me in St. Louis” thanks to the liberating American GIs.
Everyone there has been touched intimately by death and trauma, and they are all seeking answers or solace. Maxime scoffs that people need to make sense of things with their stories, side-eyeing Ariadne, and he’s right.
“Scary stories make life less scary,” Ariadne whispers during the Halloween shadow puppet show, Branagh’s self-reflective tip of the hat to the horror genre.
“A Haunting in Venice” is the most rueful and melancholy of Branagh’s Christie movies — it’s not so much a romp as it is a dizzying roller-coaster ride — and also possibly his best, with incredible craftsmanship and stylistic experimentation animating complex emotions. Stories, spiritualists or sleuths, we all need a way to process death.
Not everyone will find their St. Louis, but one thing’s for certain: Poirot will find justice, or at least the truth.
Walsh reviews movies for Tribune News Service.
It’s Branagh’s third outing as the prodigiously mustachioed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, in the trilogy of Christie adaptations he also directs. It’s 1947, 10 years after “Death on the Nile,” and Poirot has sunk into an easy retirement in Venice, Italy, with a bodyguard (Riccardo Scamarcio), a former policeman, to shoo away the locals clamoring for his detecting skills.
There’s only one person who can get past his guard, and that’s the fast-talking authoress Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey, in full gal Friday mode), who talks him into attending a seance after a children’s Halloween party.
The host is the soprano, Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), mourning the loss of her daughter Alicia (Rowan Robinson), who plunged to her watery death in the canal just one year ago. She has invited a medium, a Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) to contact her daughter at this event.
Ariadne has brought Poirot to debunk the medium, Poirot has brought his bodyguard and also in attendance are the nervous Dr. Ferrier (Jamie Dornan) and his son Leopold (Jude Hill), the nun-turned-housekeeper Olga (Camille Cottin) and Alicia’s former fiance, Maxime (Kyle Allen), a hotheaded chef.
As is customary in a Poirot mystery, a dead body turns up and the detective confines everyone in the house in order to come up with a rational explanation, which is scoffed at in this spiritualist setting. Poirot may be all business, but Branagh’s approach to the film’s style here is wildly daring.
Though Venice initially presents a lovely neo-realist scene, with teal canal waters and charming bridges, inside Rowena’s home, “A Haunting in Venice” is a decidedly waterlogged affair, a queer and queasy acid-laced Hammer horror film, Gothic scene. Aquamarine wallpaper stretches endlessly across walls and ceilings, giving the sense that everything is underwater. Wide-angle lenses stretch into fish-eye views, and there isn’t a high, low or Dutch angle that Branagh and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos don’t exploit.
It’s a vertiginous and intoxicating aesthetic, evoking the eerie, uncanny quality of the setting, never looking anyone right in the eye, but it is also distancing and agitating.
Lucy Donaldson’s edit is jagged, jumpy and erratic, resisting an easy rhythm. Of course, as in all Poirot mysteries, there is a reason for everything, and all will be revealed. Sorrow itself seems to drip down these walls, as “A Haunting in Venice” becomes a reckoning with what it means to be in such close relationship to death.
Screenwriter Michael Green has transposed “Hallowe’en Party” from an English village to the iconic Italian city, just two years after the end of World War II. The quotidian rhythms of life are fragile, tentative. Death looms like a specter in all of their histories, not just Rowena’s. Poirot’s wartime backstory, explained in “Death on the Nile,” drives his fastidious musings; it satisfies him to put everything in its place after experiencing bloody chaos in the trenches.
Mrs. Reynolds knows it all too well, having been a wartime nurse, and she eyeballs Poirot knowingly, informing him that they’re not so different after all, that they share the same burden as psychic and detective, to be the one person who people go to for answers after a loved one dies. Dr. Ferrier is also a veteran, ridden with “war neurosis” or “battle fatigue”; he’s haunted by the sights he saw liberating the concentration camps. Mrs. Reynolds’ assistant Desdemona (Emma Laird) hid in the Hungarian forest; now she dreams only of the utopia that is Missouri, having watched half of “Meet Me in St. Louis” thanks to the liberating American GIs.
Everyone there has been touched intimately by death and trauma, and they are all seeking answers or solace. Maxime scoffs that people need to make sense of things with their stories, side-eyeing Ariadne, and he’s right.
“Scary stories make life less scary,” Ariadne whispers during the Halloween shadow puppet show, Branagh’s self-reflective tip of the hat to the horror genre.
“A Haunting in Venice” is the most rueful and melancholy of Branagh’s Christie movies — it’s not so much a romp as it is a dizzying roller-coaster ride — and also possibly his best, with incredible craftsmanship and stylistic experimentation animating complex emotions. Stories, spiritualists or sleuths, we all need a way to process death.
Not everyone will find their St. Louis, but one thing’s for certain: Poirot will find justice, or at least the truth.
Walsh reviews movies for Tribune News Service.
