A Haunting in Venice

A Haunting in Venice

“Venetian Ghost” is the finest Hercule Poirot movie by Kenneth Branagh. It’s also one of Branagh’s best, period, because Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green tear down and rebuild the source material (Agatha Christie’s “Hallowe’en Party”) so that it becomes a relentlessly cunning, visually dense “old” film made with the latest technology. Mostly set in a palazzo that appears as massive as Xanadu or Castle Elsinore itself a blend of real Venice locations, London soundstages, and visual effects the movie is filled with hints of supernatural activity; much of its action takes place during an enormous thunderstorm; and its violence pushes the PG-13 rating about as far as it can go without tipping over into R territory.

It’s dark fun: Imagine if some ghastly gothic cousin of “Clue,” or maybe Branagh’s own “Dead Again” (which concerned past lives), decided to tell you a bedtime story while holding a knife behind its back. At the same time, among all the expected twists and grisly murders, “A Haunting in Venice” is an empathetic depiction of death-haunted people from director star Branagh’s parents’ generation who survived World War II with what used to be called psychic scars and wondered whether anything had really been won. Christie wrote her novel in 1969 and set it in then present day Woodleigh Common, England.

The adaptation transplants the story to Venice; sets it more than two decades earlier; populates it with British expats who complain about their country going soft while sending their children off to boarding schools staffed by Nazi sympathizers; and retains only a few elements from its predecessor a violent death involving a young girl in recent memory; the insinuating presence of an Agatha Christie like crime novelist named Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), who takes credit for creating Poirot’s reputation by making him a character in her fiction and adds others, including a seance that turns into an overnight murder investigation overseen by the recently retired detective.

Ariadne tracks down Poirot in a Venice apartment, where he claims to have been “waiting to die” (but refuses to discuss it any further unless asked). He seems resigned to being alone, but not lonely; he tells her he has no friends and needs none. Ariadne is struggling with sales, so she pulls Poirot back into sleuthing by getting him to attend a Halloween-night séance at the aforementioned house, hoping it will generate material for another bestseller. The medium is Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), who plans to communicate with the murder victim, Alicia Drake (Rowan Robinson), teenage daughter of former opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), who owns the palazzo.

There are, of course, many others gathered at the palazzo that night: all become suspects in Alicia’s murder as well as subsequent cover-up killings that we know damn well will happen sooner rather than later once we’ve seen enough stories like this one. We could go through them one by one if you like; would you find that helpful? Poirot locks himself and the rest of the ensemble cast inside the palazzo and announces that nobody can leave until he’s sorted things out.

The gallery of possibles includes wartime surgeon Leslie Ferrier (Jamie Dornan), who suffers from severe PTSD; Ferrier’s precocious son Leopold (Jude Hill, star of Branagh’s Belfast and clearly bound for great things); Rowena’s housekeeper Olga Seminoff (Camille Cottin); Maxime Gerard (Kyle Allen), Alicia’s former boyfriend; Mrs. Reynolds’ assistants Desdemona and Nicholas Holland (Emma Laird and Ali Khan), war refugees who are half-siblings.

To say anything about the rest of the story would be unfair. You won’t spoil anything by reading the book because even more so than Branagh’s previous Poirot films the relationship between source and adaptation here is akin to later James Bond films, which take a title, some character names and locations, and one or two ideas, then make up everything else. Green also wrote the recent “Death on the Nile” as well as “Blade Runner 2049” and much of the series “American Gods,” among many other things; he is a reliably good screenwriter of new stories inspired by old work.

He has one eye on commerce and another on art. He frequently tells IP-driven viewers in this nostalgia-heavy era why they like something; at the same time, he introduces fresh elements that make it seem like there was a different way to adapt or conceive this material all along. (The movie tie-in paperback of Christie’s novel includes an introduction from Green that begins with him apologizing for murdering “the book you are holding.”)

So this Poirot mystery situates itself within popular culture made in Allied countries after World War II. It is near classic postwar English-language films like “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “The Third Man,” “The Fallen Idol”; mid career Orson Welles movies such as “Touch of Evil” and “The Trial”; late period Welles films such as F for Fake” (one wonders if Branagh has seen Welles’ 1973 masterpiece), all engrossing, beautifully crafted entertainments that are also expressions of moral exhaustion and disillusionment with mankind born from six years that showcased previously unimaginable horrors: Stalingrad, Normandy, Yalta, Nagasaki; machine gunning Jews into ditches; firebombing Tokyo.

And so Green’s embittered Poirot is an atheist who practically sneers at speaking to the dead; he even gives him a monologue about his disillusionment that echoes things said about Christie near the end of her life, and in this novel, about humanity becoming increasingly cruel as a species, reflected through the sorts of crimes being committed here.

The source appears to exist out of time except for a few period-specific details and references. Branagh and Green’s movie goes in the opposite direction: It’s set very much in 1948. The children are orphans of war and post-war occupation (soldiers fathered some of them, then went back home without taking responsibility for their actions). There’s talk of “battle fatigue,” which is what PTSD was called during World War II; during the previous world war, they called it “shell shock.”

The plot turns on the economic desperation of native citizens who don’t have enough money to live anymore; previously moneyed expatriates who are too emotionally and often financially shattered to re-create the life they had before the war; and mostly Eastern European refugees who didn’t have much to start with but at least were allowed into Egypt because labor was needed there. The overriding sense is that some of these characters would literally kill to get back to being what they were.

It was only reasonable to compare Branagh with Orson Welles in his early career. He was a prodigy who had become world famous for acting and directing by the time he was thirty, habitually taking on projects that he originated and oversaw. He straddled the line between theater and film. He loved the classics Shakespeare especially and popular movie genres (musicals, horror). He had an impresario’s sense of showmanship and an ego to match it.

Never has he been more brazenly Wellesian than in this movie. The film feels “big,” as Welles’ films always did, even when they were made for pocket change. But it’s not bloated or poky or self-important: like a Welles picture, every scene gets in and out as quickly as possible, it has a curtain time to meet; including credits, its running time is 107 minutes.

Film-history buffs will appreciate the many visual shout outs to the master’s filmography, including spooky views of Venice that nod at Welles’s “Othello” and a squawking cockatoo straight out of “Citizen Kane.” At times it feels as if Branagh conducted a séance and channeled not just Welles but other directors who worked in black-and-white, expressionistic, Gothic-flavored, very Wellesian style (among them “The Third Man” director Carol Reed and “The Manchurian Candidate”/“Seven Days in May” director John Frankenheimer).

Branagh and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos have also cited Richard Brooks’ 1967 adaptation of “In Cold Blood” along with Masaki Kobayashi’s “Kwaidan” as influences. The movie uses fish-eye lenses, dutch tilts, hilariously ominous close ups of significant objects (including a grotesque cuckoo clock), extreme low- and high angle shots, deep-focus compositions that arrange the actors from foreground to deep background, with window and door frames, sections of furniture, sometimes actors’ bodies slicing up the shot to create additional frames within the frame.

Like post-millennial Michael Mann and Steven Soderbergh movies, “A Haunting in Venice” was shot digitally (though at IMAX resolution) and lets the medium be what it is. The low-light interior scenes make no attempt to simulate film stock; they deny you the comfort food of seeing a movie set in the past that uses actual film or tries for a “film look.” It’s unbalancing, in a fascinating way. The images have a hyper clarity that’s almost hypnotic, an otherworldly shimmer. In tight close ups of actors’ faces or heads and shoulders, their eyes seem to have been lit from within.

Branagh and editor Lucy Donaldson time the cuts so that the more ostentatious images (for instance: Poirot spotting a rat crawling out of stone gargoyle’s mouth; Poirot and Ariadne seen through metal screen of fireplace, with flames in foreground; multiple shots of characters running while holding guns) are onscreen just long enough for you to register what you’re seeing but not so long that you don’t get a chance to laugh at how far the movie is willing to go for the effect. Movies just aren’t directed this way anymore, in any format, which is awful because when they are and especially when they’re as too-much as this one they can be intoxicating.

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