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A Haunting in Venice Movie Review

A Haunting in Venice is a 2023 mystery film directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh. It is the weakest Branagh Poirot movie so far.

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“Scary stories make real life a little less scary“

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In post-World War II Venice, Poirot, now retired and living in his own exile, reluctantly attends a séance. But when one of the guests is murdered, it is up to the former detective to once again uncover the killer. First off, I actually liked ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ and ‘Death on the Nile’. I do understand those movies’ detractors, but I found them to be perfectly solid adaptations.

But even I cannot excuse this third movie in Branagh’s self-described “Christie-Verse”. This is the lowest point in the series yet and now Branagh really needs to start thinking about his future as a director. If I were him, I would start focusing on other films and not just this series. He just fails to find his voice with these adaptations.

This film was a prime example of that issue. The flick basically jettisons the mystery elements of the Christie novels in favor of more horror elements. I do get this choice as Branagh clearly wants to modernize and update the Poirot formula of the novels for the newer generations, but he didn’t go fully into that horror territory, resulting in a film that is neither modern nor old-fashioned, but stuck in this odd limbo in between those two.

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A Haunting in Venice tries so hard to be a ‘Conjuring’ movie basically, but it fails miserably at that given that the scares simply weren’t there. It’s an atmospheric film for sure and the ghost scenes were fun, but the movie isn’t effectively creeping you out or intriguing you as a viewer enough to care about its rather slim plot and even thinner characters.

Yes, this time around we got the worst cast and the weakest characters yet. Michelle Yeoh was terrific as a supposed psychic medium, but her role was too small here. Others are mostly forgettable with Jamie Dornan being quite uninteresting and Tina Fey being horribly miscast as this crime novelist who gets the most screen time, but the actress simply doesn’t fit this role, so ultimately the character did not work.

Kelly Reilly is the most memorable of the bunch and her role is the most interesting one, but the movie robs any of these characters of any momentum as it devotes way too much screen time on its visuals and atmosphere than on meaningfully developing their arcs. Kenneth Branagh himself continues to just be serviceable as Poirot. He performs him well, but he characterizes him poorly. Basically, the character was portrayed as being disillusioned and disappointed with people, but this annoyed me to no end as Poirot was never like that in the books.

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A Haunting in Venice is gorgeous, there is no question about that. Some scenes were actually shot on location in Venice, which made those moments extra cinematic and just gorgeous. The reliance on CGI was much less present in this sequel and this is the only area where the film trumped its predecessors. The horror mystery atmosphere is well conveyed, the Gothic tone worked and the costumes, production design, score and sound were all superb, but I simply did not care about the story enough to be engaged with it.