I don't know about you, but after the double whammy of Belfast and Death on the Nile, I was ready to give up on Kenneth Branagh as a director. Yet, like Michael Corleone famously said: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!"
Turns out that what Branagh and, more specifically, his Agatha Christie adaptations needed was a healthy shot of nonsense plus the spooky seasonings of horror. A Haunting in Venice, now streaming on Hulu, succeeds by untethering itself from literary fidelity, twisting Christie's Hallowe'en Party out of shape in pursuit of maximum entertainment. Though a sense of melancholy pervades, self-serious prestige is abandoned, or mayhap sacrificed at a witches' altar. And from its deadened carcass, Hercule Poirot emerges as the center of a ghostly storm, the skeptic anchor keeping this Hammer Horror resurgence from floating away on the Lido tide…
In an old Venetian palace, a congregation of unusual suspects come together for a séance presided over by the mysterious Joyce Reynolds. She's a silver-haired Michelle Yeoh, coming off her Oscar afterglow with a fun supporting turn, all self-curated enigma and sublimated calculation. Her possession circus is a tremendous highlight, but a last conversation with the Belgian detective is even more fascinating. The Best Actress champion is the MVP in a cast of actors who, to put it bluntly, understood the assignment. Branagh's Poirot has never been more palatable than in this post-war gloom, Tina Fey indulges in retro delivery galore, Kelly Reilly is a shattered diva, and even young Jude Hill acquits himself nicely.
Still, none of those flesh and blood figures stand a chance against the formalistic hauntings at hand. Given the privilege to shoot in actual sets rather than green screen nothingness, Haris Zambarloukos gets drunk on the possibilities of derelict architecture, shadow play, and ghostly apparitions. Musically, Hildur Guðnadóttir delivers a beautiful lament while the sound design amps up the shocking shlock to great effect. Sammy Sheldon relishes the chance to imagine Poirot out of the pre-war fashions he usually decks, and John Paul Kelly goes berserk on the set design, fresco-ing palimpsests of paint and mildew to bring a fairytale forest inside. It's so much and so much fun, surprisingly artful, and occasionally canny, like when it posits Ariadne Oliver as a collision of authorial intents - Christie and Branagh and their public.
I'll never stop begrudging Branagh's Original Screenplay win, but if that's what it took for him to stop chasing gold, get free and properly inspired, then at least some good came out of it. What about you, dear reader, are you into this horror-tinged Poirot? Did A Haunting in Venice besot or annoy you?