I may be speaking optimistically here– I often do– but it feels like we’re reaching the end of a particularly bleak mode of blockbuster filmmaking. The gargantuan success of Barbie and Oppenheimer suggests that audiences are ready for something new, as do such relative success stories as Talk to Me, Asteroid City, and Skinamarink. What’s more, films that only a few years ago would have been automatic cash cows– superhero flicks, double-digit sequels, reboots featuring long-in-the-tooth icons from decades past– have posted returns ranging from the disappointing to the disastrous. I’m no box office pundit, but the smell of death is in the air. The blockbuster, as we’ve known it for the past 15 to 20 years, is on its way out. And suddenly I’m interested.
Hollywood, after all, is rarely more fascinating than when it’s grasping at straws. When a tried and true formula begins to falter, the studios desperately try to find the threads worth saving and reconfigure them in often bizarre ways. This appears to be the case with A Haunting with Venice, which takes one successful franchise– actor-director Kenneth Branagh’s improbably take on Agatha Christie’s supersleuth Hercule Poirot– and awkwardly shoehorns it into the formula of another: the stately, gothic horror of the Conjuring cinematic universe. The result, while not “good,” is a deeply strange curio, and may well go down as an unintentional snapshot of a troubled moment in Hollywood.
A Haunting in Venice is very loosely based on Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party, a lesser work which, it must be noted, is not set in Venice and does not feature a haunting. When we rejoin Branagh’s Poirot, he is living in seclusion in the City of Canals, turning away persistent throngs of fans and would-be clients (his only permitted guest is the pastry man, who makes two deliveries a day). Poirot’s sanctum is breached however, by his old friend, the Christie-like mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey). Oliver convinces Poirot to accompany her to a Halloween party thrown by opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) to witness the talents of renowned psychic Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), who is being pressed to contact Drake’s late daughter and about whom Oliver is considering writing a book. Inevitably, a murder takes place, and Poirot must once again round up the possible suspects/victims (which also include a jittery doctor played by Jamie Dornan, a precocious child played by Jude Hill, and Reynolds’ twin assistants, played by Emma Laird and Ali Khan) and put his Little Grey Cells to work.
The above is, if not precisely the plot of Hallowe’en Party, not especially far from the Christie playbook. But there’s more: the party, you see, is being held in an ancient children’s home in which scores of young tenants perished during the Plague. Those children’s spirits are said to enact revenge upon medical professionals in a curse known as “The Children’s Vendetta.” Poirot, for his part, finds himself distracted by disembodied voices and a mysterious child who lingers after the partygoers disperse. As if that weren’t enough, there are periodic jumpscares– crashes of thunder, popping lightbulbs, the occasional very loud bird– to evoke the feel of a contemporary horror movie, and countless extras flitting about in dark robes and white masks. The effect is something like a dinner theater murder mystery staged entirely inside a Spirit Halloween.
These two competing genres– the cozy mystery and the gothic horror story– end up working against each other. It’s hard to imagine anyone being actively scared while watching A Haunting in Venice; even if you’ve never seen the previous films in the series (or any other Poirot adaptation), it only takes the most basic grounding in media literacy to understand that this isn’t going to earnestly be that kind of movie. The horror elements, meanwhile, have the effect of overwhelming the mystery. Even Poirot has trouble keeping track of all the clues and suspects amidst all the spooky goings-on, and when he does put the pieces together we’ve almost forgotten that there’s a murder to be solved. Horror movies don’t have us trained to be detectives; we know going into a Conjuring film that the culprit is going to be “ghosts.” A Haunting in Venice wants to be two things, and ultimately succeeds at neither.
Actually, let me walk that back a little bit. The film’s third goal– arguably its primary one– is to provide a bit of harmlessly “spoopy” atmosphere, and to that end it is more or less successful. The sets and camerawork are appropriately grandiose, and an expository shadow puppet show setting up the Children’s Vendetta is a delight (even if its subject matter of mass child-death seems like it would be a lot to spring on a party of kiddies who have just survived World War II). The cast seems to be having fun, particularly Yeoh, taking a well-deserved post-Oscar victory lap, and Fey, who could clearly spew out 1940s tough-dame-isms for hours. And while doofy all-star murder mysteries are an odd career path for a man once hailed as the next Laurence Olivier, it can’t be denied that Branagh understands and cares about M. Poirot more than the average shepherd of Hollywood IP (certainly more than the guy who made Artemis Fowl or Thor), and his take on the character is surprisingly adept. In the middle of all of that Hollywood bombast, Branagh’s Poirot is far more dignified than he needs to be.
Like the previous films in the series, A Haunting in Venice is a reasonably agreeable piffle: less offensive aesthetically and intellectually than the average blockbuster, but nowhere near as smart or intricately crafted as a Christie original (or, for that matter, the long-running ITV adaptation with David Suchet behind the mustache). But its principal thrills, again, are metatextual. Hollywood’s well of ideas has run so dry that they’ve swung all the way around the curve to create something very nearly original. “Hercule Poirot with Ghosts” is the sort of premise that could only be delivered by an algorithm or a madman, and there is a daffy thrill to watching it unspool. It doesn’t take a master detective to know who killed Hollywood, but, like Poirot himself, it’s hard not to be drawn into the post-mortem.
A Haunting in Venice
2023
dir. Kenneth Branagh
103 min.
Opens Friday, 9/15 @ Capitol Theatre and theaters everywhere
