A Haunting in Venice turns an Agatha Christie mystery into Scooby-Doo (and it rules)
Actor-director Kenneth Branagh is clearly having the best time with his Hercule Poirot movies. The latest, A Haunting in Venice, marks Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green’s third take on Agatha Christie’s iconic detective, after 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express and 2022’s Death on the Nile. It’s also the loosest adaptation of the three of them by far. In the new movie, Branagh breaks all the adaptation rules. He smashes genres together. He goes fully over the top, which is exactly the direction that his Christie adaptations have been rolling toward. Branagh finally breaks free, making A Haunting in Venice the best entry in the series to date.
[Ed. note: This post contains light setup spoilers for A Haunting in Venice.]
A Haunting in Venice is technically based on Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party, in that it takes place on Halloween during a party hosted by someone named Rowena Drake, where character named Joyce Reynolds is killed, leading famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot to swoop in and solve the murder. But Branagh takes endless creative liberties, transforming the story from whodunit to Gothic horror.
Now the Halloween party doesn’t take place in a small English town; it’s in a crumbling Venetian palazzo. Also, regular Englishwoman Rowena Drake (True Detective’s Kelly Reilly) is now a glamorous, fading opera star who wants to host a seance to communicate with her dead daughter, who she claims was killed by ghosts. And perhaps most importantly, Joyce Reynolds is no longer a precocious 13-year-old but an adult psychic who claims she can communicate with the dead. (She’s also played by Michelle Yeoh.) The question of whether ghosts and hauntings are real plays a big part in this movie. It’s less of an
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