Kenneth Branagh’s latest Poirot mystery features horror-movie jump scares, a great cast — from Tina Fey to Michelle Yeoh to Yellowstone MVP Kelly Reilly — and no pulse
So we’re really committing to this cinematic Poirotverse, huh? OK.
The Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is arguably Agatha Christie’s finest creation, next to her own persona of Agatha Christie, Queen of the Whodunit. He’s been played by everybody from Tony Randall to John Malkovich; Peter Ustinov portrayed the deductive sleuth six times, and David Suchet has made a career out of gifting TV viewers with the definitive take on Christie’s murder-mystery icon. He’s graced 33 novels and 51 short stories, which means that Kenneth Branagh — the actor-filmmaker who’s directing a series of movies starring himself as the master detective — has no end of potential Poirot potboilers to peruse and put forth onscreen.
Having already tackled two big Poirot tales — Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022) — the question was: which Christie mystery might he do next? The obvious choice would have been something like Evil Under the Sun or The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; instead, Branagh and his co-writer Michael Green chose a slightly deeper cut in the back catalog, a 1969 book called Hallowe’en Party that finds Poirot investigating the death of a young girl at a costume party. The title was then changed to A Haunting in Venice, and relocated from England to the far more cinematic city of endless canals. But why stop there? They also changed the instigating murder, added a seance, introduced a whole new cast of characters, upped the horror aspect by roughly 300 percent, and came up with something that is more or less nothing like the source material. It’s practically a new Christie story. We, um, applaud the ambition.
The Halloween factor is still there, as is Branagh’s singularly peculiar Poirot, his franchise co-star of a multilayered mustache, and Ariadne Oliver, another regular Christie character who accompanies Poirot on his outings. She’s a popular mystery novelist, and you don’t need to use all of your little grey cells to guess who she’s based on. (Meet Agatha Christie, autofiction pioneer!) As played by Tina Fey, she walks and talks like she’s just stepped out of a screwball comedy already in progress. The SNL/30 Rock veteran dials things down here in terms of her comic persona, but she’s still a breath of fresh air in what ends up being a far more stodgy and stale take on these types of all-star Clue games writ large. Christie’s murder mysteries featuring her famously fastidious hero were always one part brain teasers, one part primo pulp fiction, and several parts social caricaturing of the snobby rich, the high-society rotten, the rough-hewn working-class, and a variety of recognizable odds-and-sods types. All of the ingredients are in place. It’s just that the recipe is completely wrong.
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It’s 1947, the legendary detective has retired, and now simply tends to his garden in a modest apartment in Venice. He’s had to hire a bodyguard (John Wick: Chapter 2‘s Riccardo Scamarcio) to keep all of his admirers and would-be clients at bay. Luckily, his old friend Oliver is granted an audience, and she has a proposition for him. Come with her to a seance on All Hallow’s Eve, where the famous medium Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) will attempt to contact the late daughter of the singer Rowena Drake (Yellowstone‘s Kelly Reilly). Oliver is sure that the psychic is a fake, and she wants Poirot to help her prove it. Besides, she needs fodder for a new book. Help a friend out, Hercule!
So he accompanies her to the Halloween shindig, meets Ms. Reynolds, and no sooner has someone tried to drown Poirot in a bobbing-for-apples tub than boom, there’s a dead body impaled on a statue. The assembled guests — an overly anxious doctor and his son (Jamie Dornan and Jude Hill, both so good in Branagh’s coming-of-age movie Belfast), a housekeeper (Call My Agent‘s Camille Cottin), Reynolds’ assistants (Emma Laird and Ali Khan), the fiancé of Ms. Drake’s daughter (Kyle Allen) — are all aflutter. Though Poirot may be retired, he’s keen to catch the killer among them. “I knew you were in there,” Oliver says, as her friend starts to engage his little grey cells again. “All it took was a corpse.” Only now the detective, a longtime skeptic of anything involving the paranormal, begins to see and hear things… things of a possible supernatural nature….
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And now the sleuthing starts, with Branagh dosing the usual whodunit template with a lot of fancy camera angles, a good deal of gothic atmosphere, and a whole lotta jump scares. Every name from the cast plays up their parts from mousy to manic, suspicious to very suspicious. Yet not even the combination of old-school murder mystery and hyped-up haunted house shenanigans can give this Poirot excursion a pulse. The actual mystery is why this feels so anemic and sluggish, even with some heavy hitters doing their best attempt at Agatha Christie archetypes. Put it this way: When you have Fey, Yeoh and Reilly in your ensemble, and you still can’t generate any sense of snap, crackle or pop? There’s a serious problem.
A Haunting in Venice makes good use of its locale, with tons of tourist-baiting shots of the city. It just doesn’t know what to do with the tried-and-true formula its got, or how to incorporate the tweaks to that formula in a way that jolts things into life. Even before the murderer is revealed, you’ll recognize the method in which the movie dispatches its victims: They, like us, were probably bored to death.
Rowena's intention was never to kill her, but an unfortunate situation happened. While taking care of the young woman in her mother's absence, maid Olga Seminoff (Camille Cottin) gave Alicia a lethal dose of the poisonous honey in order to help her sleep, unaware of its actual content.
There are four deaths in A Haunting in Venice, three of which are murders. Through his incredible detective skills, Poirot solves the murders, and while the film ends on an ambiguous note about whether ghosts are real, the murders are solved by real-world clues.
Both films are standalone whodunits, with Branagh's Poirot the only returning cast member, so you don't necessarily have to watch (or rewatch) them before A Haunting in Venice.
Indeed, all the typical ghost fare turns out to be a sham, and indeed, Poirot can rationally chalk the mystic visions he had in the house to hallucinogenic honey. But he still submits that it was his subconscious that pieced together facts that manifested in the supposedly prescient specters he saw.
Obsessed with keeping Alicia for herself, Rowena poisoned her with small doses of the honey of Rhododendron ponticum, weakening and then caring for a hallucinating Alicia (the same honey seemingly caused Poirot's visions) to isolate her from Maxime when they planned to reconcile; the night of Alicia's suicide, Olga ...
Rowena Drake is the secondary antagonist in Agatha Christie's 1969 Hercule Poirot novel Hallowe'en Party and its 2010 adaptation in Agatha Christie's Poirot. She also serves as the main antagonist of Kenneth Branagh's 2023 film adaptation, A Haunting in Venice.
How Does A Haunting in Venice End? In the final scenes of A Haunting in Venice, Poirot reveals that Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly from Yellowstone) murdered her daughter Alicia (Rowan Robinson). She felt abandoned when Alicia got engaged to the chef Maxime Gerard (Kyle Allen from American Horror Story: Apocalypse).
Moreover, it seems unlikely a proper sequel will happen as director Kenneth Branagh wants to adapt the Agatha Christie books in the form of an anthology film series, wherein there would be new installments or follow-ups which would be entirely new stories and not continuations of previous stories.
People may be sensitive to birds in captivity. A sad parrot misses his owner and hasn't spoken since. The pet bird does not die! You see it, barely, peeking out of a covered birdcage, on its way to a new home at the end.
What happens at the end of Death in Venice? The book's closing scene shows Aschenbach again watching the Polish boy. Just as the boy seems to requite the attention, Aschenbach slumps in his chair and dies. The reader is left to determine whether the physical end resulted from a common disease or a moral decline.
Through the portrayal of Aschenbach, Death in Venice contains both an affirmation and resistance of the world of antibourgeois values. It is a critique in that it presents the idea that the artist who wants recognition must stay away from life, even though that distance leads to stagnation of the imagination.
The case appears to involve a supernatural context, and there are jump scares, including the sudden appearance of a ghost and a parrot, and a falling chandelier.
While the location, Venice, is a real place, the 2023 supernatural mystery movie is based on a fictional story. What is A Haunting in Venice about? The events go down in the World War II aftermath and see Poirot joining a séance at a haunted palazzo in Venice.
The film is set in post-World War II Venice, and follows Poirot as he investigates a murder at a séance. The film has a dark and atmospheric tone, with some jump scares and disturbing imagery. However, the film is not a straight-up horror film.
Set in postwar Europe, the film has no gore, no demons, no bloodied teenagers. Instead, we get crumbling Italian palazzos, fleeting apparitions, and some surprisingly sophisticated themes.
Summary. A Haunting in Venice reveals that Rowena Drake is responsible for the murders and her motive was to prevent her daughter from leaving her. Ariadne and Vitale are working together to profit from Poirot's presence and solve the case for closure.
How Does A Haunting in Venice End? In the final scenes of A Haunting in Venice, Poirot reveals that Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly from Yellowstone) murdered her daughter Alicia (Rowan Robinson). She felt abandoned when Alicia got engaged to the chef Maxime Gerard (Kyle Allen from American Horror Story: Apocalypse).
Unaware of Peter's intention to drown her in the lake so they could stay together in death, Rebecca agreed to the deal, and only understood Peter's malevolent intents once she was drowning in the lake, Peter having left her body. She was found the next morning by Flora and Jamie and it was assumed she died by suicide.
Apples are used in the bobbing game during the Halloween party at the start of the novel. Apples are symbolic of temptation and sin. In fact, Joyce is killed in a vat of apples meant for the bobbing contest, showing the sinful nature of apples.
Introduction: My name is Van Hayes, I am a thankful, friendly, smiling, calm, powerful, fine, enthusiastic person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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