Christie as a horror movie doesn’t work, says Julia Hamilton.
A Haunting in Venice is the third in a trilogy of films produced and acted in by Kenneth Branagh as the celebrated and beloved detective Hercule Poirot.
Every generation has its own Poirot – my favourite of all time is David Suchet, who simply is Poirot. Branagh, however, even with elabor-ately appropriate facial hair, still looks somehow like Branagh with stuck-on whiskers.
The first film in Branagh’s trilogy was, of course, Murder on the Orient Express, followed by Death on the Nile which seemed, Christie-style, to have a curse on it, plagued as it was by Covid-19 delays in production and sexual-misconduct allegations relating to one of its stars. Nevertheless, it did better than expected with both box office and streaming revenues, and Branagh was given the go-ahead to produce and star in this latest iteration, based in fact on Christie’s novel Hallowe’en Party, which, interestingly, his mother was seen reading in Belfast, Branagh’s Bildungsroman about his childhood in Belfast in 1969 at the beginning of the Troubles. Apparently there was no foreshadowing intended, but it makes a neat link.
