A Haunting in Venice (2023)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Medium Scare

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Stark and spooky, Kenneth Branagh's third Hercule Poirot movie successfully adopts a whole new atmosphere, less exotic and edgier, more haunted; it's a tense, thoughtful, and satisfying mystery.

Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express had a fluid use of space aboard a cramped, moving train, while his Death on the Nile employed bright, open spaces. A Haunting in Venice, which is mainly set indoors, during a storm, and in the late hours of Halloween night — when the border between the living and the dead is said to be at its thinnest — plays with more shadowy, angular, and even hallucinogenic filmmaking.

Detective Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) is retired and living in Venice. He has hired an ex-police officer, Vitale Portfoglio (Riccardo Scamarcio), as a bodyguard, to ward off desperate invaders looking for sleuthing services. He receives a visit from best-selling mystery author Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), who has a proposition. She's working on a book about a famous medium, Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh). She can't figure out how Reynolds does her supernatural seances, and wants Poirot to accompany her to see if he can find anything.

They attend a Halloween party for orphans at the palazzo of Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), who, after the party, wishes to contact the spirit of her daughter, Alicia. Alicia had fallen from the balcony and drowned, and may or may not have been murdered. Lo and behold, more murders begin occurring and Poirot goes to work seeking the facts and finding a suspect. But something is wrong: Poirot himself has begun hearing voices and seeing ghosts.

Author Agatha Christie published the original novel, Hallowe'en Party, in 1969, more than thirty years after the Orient Express and Nile novels, perhaps suggesting a hard-earned fatalism, which Branagh attaches to the movie's fabric. He seems freshly inspired, and his direction flourishes through Christie's material.

As ever, he is equally adept with his actors, himself giving an appealingly wounded performance, while slowly stripping away the other characters' veneers of protection, revealing their painful pasts. The mystery itself is clever and effective, though it comes almost with a sense of resignation; there's no joy in solving this murder. Even so, A Haunting in Venice leaves off with a sense of promise, and it's an agreeable capper to a fine trilogy.