So I recently watched the new Kenneth Branagh film, “A Haunting in Venice”, like the two previous films, this one is also a Hercule Poirot movie that’s based on an Agatha Christie murder mystery novel (this time it’s based on the book “Hallowe’en Party”)
The story this time happens in post World War II in Venice and it follows how Hercule Poirot is now a very famous detective who is just trying to live peacefully and not work too hard, but one day when an old friend brings him into a seance, Poirot gets sucked into a mystery where both his beliefs and his detective skills will be set to question.
I thought that the story of this film was actually handled very well, the writing in my opinion was extremely good with the way Branagh’s character has to go through different extreme moments that really make him question his own sanity and his own beliefs, and how he slowly questions himself more and more if what is happening is truly something that he cannot solve, or does everything still have an explanation.
This movie also showed again why Kenneth Branagh is a great director, he crafted in this movie some really interesting scenes that were beautifully shot. He also got to show how good he is at making a thriller by directing this film in a way that always keeps the audience locked into the mystery at every scene and moment while not making anything too obvious that would make the movie predictable and ruin the tension or the mystery itself.
Unfortunately, though the movie I think also has a couple of problems that I was pretty disappointed by. First of all, the movie is tagged as a horror movie and you can see while watching it that the intent was to make it like a horror movie, Branagh really tried to craft a lot of scares in this film but I was honestly very disappointed in this whole aspect of the film, I didn’t like any of the scares, I didn’t find them scary and I don’t think he crafted any of them well, it just felt to me that he was trying really hard to push a horror aspect in this film but he just doesn’t understand how to direct horror and it came out as sloppy and not scary at all.
I was also a bit disappointed in the actors, these movies are known for having big stacked casts, and here it also had a pretty big cast with some great actors, and some like Kenneth Branagh and Michelle Yeoh did a fantastic job, but there were also many actors and actresses in this film that I thought were doing a pretty bad job, to points where at certain scenes it took me out of them which was really frustrating at times.
Overall, A Haunting in Venice is a great murder mystery, as a horror movie… I wouldn’t expect much, but it still had great camera work, fantastic production designs, and a super thrilling mystery that will really keep you stuck to your chair for most of the movie and will also really surprise you at the end when you figure out what happened.
My score for A Haunting in Venice is: 7.5/10
NDR 