'A Haunting in Venice' Review: Kenneth Branagh's New Agatha Christie – IndieWire – IndieWire
The whodunnit style has been on a hell of a run since “Knives Out” hit theaters in 2019. Rian Johnson’s witty, socially acutely aware homicide thriller turned an electrifying cultural phenomenon — and reminded a cinematic universe-loving Hollywood {that a} repeatable system involving rotating ensemble casts and picturesque settings might be nice for enterprise. However America’s fascination with the twisty adventures of Benoit Blanc makes it simple to neglect that there’s been one other studio-backed whodunnit franchise on the multiplexes for the previous half-decade.
Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot collection — which started with 2017’s “Homicide on the Orient Specific” and continued with final yr’s superior “Dying on the Nile” — has emerged as an easy different for thriller purists turned off by the flashiness of the “Knives Out” movies. Whereas Johnson retains reminding us that homicide mysteries are dwelling, respiratory entities that may push narrative boundaries and make us snicker and assume (whereas often being too on-line for their very own good), Branagh’s devoted variations of Agatha Christie classics operate as a management group making the case that the style was doing simply tremendous for the previous century. Having each franchises working on the similar time has benefitted each previous and new thriller followers — the world will get to look at Christie’s ongoing affect on popular culture whereas revisiting her greatest works.
Associated Tales
Branagh launched his collection with Christie’s most evident beginning factors, kicking issues off along with her best-selling “Orient Specific” earlier than adapting her beloved “Dying on the Nile” (which got here with a campy hook a few cruise ship carrying sufficient champagne to fill the eponymous river). However whereas Christie’s large bibliography incorporates sufficient high quality mysteries to fill a number of lifetimes of filmmaking, there wasn’t a 3rd novel with comparable apparent title recognition. So Branagh obtained artistic for his third movie, taking Christie’s Gothic-tinged thriller “Hallowe’en Celebration” and transferring the setting from England to Italy to make “A Haunting in Venice.”
Quite a bit has modified since Poirot solved his final thriller on the Nile. The world’s best detective has stop the sport fully, retiring to Venice for a quiet life that features little contact with anybody however the pastry deliveryman. He’s continuously bombarded with requests to tackle new instances, however a lifetime of observing the brutality that people are able to has left him jaded and misanthropic.
With out the mental stimulation of fixing crimes, he has to seek out different methods to maintain his mind sharp. When his previous buddy Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a thriller novelist whose knack for puzzles rivals his personal, invitations him to a Halloween get together to assist her expose a grifting psychic, he quickly finds himself attending a post-soiree seance at a Gothic manor that has been the positioning of unimaginable tragedies. The get together’s hosts have spent years grieving the suicide of their younger daughter, who fell to her loss of life from one of many tower’s highest home windows. The sudden loss of life tore the prolonged household aside, prompting brutal divorces and crippling psychological well being issues for her father.
It’s unsurprising that the dad and mom have taken consolation in “speaking” with their late daughter by means of the psychic communications of alleged medium Joyce Reynolds (a predictably trendy Michelle Yeoh). But it surely doesn’t take lengthy for Poirot to identify an assistant hiding within the chimney and expose her act as a fraud. The ageing detective takes the chance to soliloquize about his distaste for psychics who prey on weak folks for cash and state his disbelief in supernatural occasions.
If the night time had ended there, Poirot may have merely returned to his serene retirement. However when he sneaks away to follow his bobbing for apples abilities, an unidentified assailant assaults him from behind and almost kills him. Along with his personal security in thoughts, Poirot locks down the premises and units out to seek out the would-be killer within the room — however his night time of methodical questioning quickly turns into derailed by ghostly occurrences that decision his unshakeable perception in science and purpose into query.
On paper, “A Haunting in Venice” has all of the parts of an excellent whodunnit. A star-studded forged fixing a Gothic thriller in one in every of Europe’s most lovely cities must be sufficient to entice any Christie devotee. However no quantity of star energy can compensate for the truth that nobody appears to be having any enjoyable. Yeoh makes a commendable effort to craft a three-dimensional femme fatale, however the remainder of the forged appears content material to placed on a melodrama with all the joy of a jigsaw puzzle referred to as “The Wheat Discipline.”
Regardless of the franchises’ apparent variations, it’s getting more durable and more durable to disregard the shadow that the “Knives Out” motion pictures forged over Branagh’s self-described “Christie-verse.” When you actually can’t hate a film for differing from an unrelated director’s imaginative and prescient, stuffy variations like “A Haunting in Venice” appear even stuffier when Johnson is consistently reminding us how a lot of the style’s uncharted territory is ready to be explored.
The largest promoting level for Branagh’s Poirot motion pictures has at all times been his clear ardour for the supply materials and willingness to let Christie’s thrilling tales to face on their very own. However his slick Hollywood variations hold getting caught in a purgatory that gives neither the joy of the “Knives Out” motion pictures nor the dry English appeal of the unique BBC Hercule Poirot specials. Maybe the general public service facet of briefly returning a few of Christie’s greatest works to the zeitgeist (and hopefully pointing some new readers in the direction of her huge library) is ample justification for the collection’ mediocrity. But when Branagh thinks he’s making a big contribution to her cinematic legacy, it may be time to mercifully euthanize the franchise with an adaptation of “Curtain: Poirot’s Final Case.”
Grade: B-
“A Haunting in Venice” opens in theaters on Friday, September 15.
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