Branagh gets closer to Poirot's haunted heart.

 

 

Last night I watched  Kenneth Branagh’s 2023 Poirot movie, A Haunting In Venice.  

I thought it was an interesting step away from the big budget, heavily star-laden extravaganzas of his last two Poirots, with a very limited location, almost all of it shot inside a Venetian Palazzo, but with Venice still in view enough for locations to be identified and enjoyed.   

It has an interesting, if less expensive, cast: Jamie Dornan and the remarkable young Jude Hill play father and son again as they did in Branagh’s Belfast, but offering us very different characters; Michelle Yeoh gives us some rather pleasing scenery-chewing as the medium Joyce Reynolds; Tina Fey steps back 60 years into a 14’s screwball comedy persona as the Agatha Christie stand-in, Ariadne Oliver, the writer whose fortune is based on fictionalising Poirot’s cases and Camile Cottin, who I last watched with much pleasure in ‘Call My Agent’ is there along with some British actors I did not really know, such as Kyle Allen, Ali Khan and Emma Laird.    

Branagh used his favourite cinematographer, Haris Zambarloukos, who shot his previous Poirots, plus Cinderella and Belfast, and who has recently filmed Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.   In A Haunting Zambarloukos used discombobulating ‘Dutch Angles’ and unusual POVs, which alongside Hildur Guonadottir’s queasy score (Joker and Magdalene both benefited from her contributions), and the editing of Lucy Donaldson, heighten the weirdness of what is essentially a Cert 12 family horror movie.  

One of the benefits of watching this on DVD that I was able to replay one shot frame by frame and see something I had almost missed on first sight.   Although throughout the story Poirot is determined to debunk any supernatural explanations, and solves a number of murders by doing so, these few frames towards the end do raise a question about the supernatural that is not addressed or answered.      

Typically it A Haunting divided critics, some claiming it to the best of Branagh’s Poirots, others saying it was the worst.   I thought that the smaller scale suited Agatha Christie’s actual literary importance.  This is not an adaptation of War and Peace, The English Patient, David Copperfield or Cloud Atlas. It is light entertainment, but it really does entertain.  When Branagh makes a film he always uses the best talent available.   Some Producers/Directors ‘show us the money’ on the screen;  Branagh shows the talent. Michael Green, as an example, wrote both Logan and Blade Runner 2049.   

I do not know the original novel, Hallowe’en Party, set in the `Home Counties’, nor its chronological place in the saga, but I thought Branagh and the scriptwriter with whom he created all the Poirot movies have now established an arc that is deepening and darkening Poirot’s story, especially showing the effect of the two World Wars and the loss of his late wife, Katherine.  In A Haunting Joyce the medium exclaims her name when in a (supposed) trance.  Some may remember that the story of Katherine and Poirot was told in Branagh’s Death on the Nile, and the heaviness of so much death obviously hangs heavily on his shoulders and heart.  That is why he had given up his detective work at the beginning of the film and retired to Venice.   

I hope that this movie will continue his career in this less spectacular but more personal tone.