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‘a haunting in venice’ review: michelle yeoh and tina fey join kenneth branagh in his snoozy agatha christie adaptation.

A Halloween seance in a dark palazzo brings detective Hercule Poirot out of retirement in Branagh's third run at the role.  

By Caryn James

Caryn James

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Like Agatha Christie herself, Kenneth Branagh found a reliable formula for mysteries. In his two previous adaptations of Christie novels, he directed and played the cerebral detective Hercule Poirot amid a star-filled cast, in an exotic location with at least one killer on the loose. Murder on the Orient Express (2017), with Michelle Pfeiffer and Johnny Depp, had an enjoyably retro, over-the-top style. Death on the Nile (2022) was a bit less starry and diverting.

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The story takes place in 1947 and is very loosely based on a lesser-known, late-career Christie novel, Hallowe’en Party (1969), altering the plot, changing existing characters and adding new ones. And it shifts Christie’s English country-house location to Venice, where Poirot has retired and putters around his rooftop garden. His old friend, the mystery writer Ariadne Oliver, arrives, solidly played by Tina Fey in ’40s-era sharp-tongued American mode, as if she’s channeling Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Ariadne entices Poirot to come to a Halloween seance in a supposedly haunted palazzo, to expose a clairvoyant she is certain is a charlatan. Michelle Yeoh , always a delight to see, plays the medium, and at one point is spun around wildly like a woman possessed. But lower your expectations: She has a much smaller role than the trailer suggests.

Lower your expectations for Venice, too. The change of location should have worked great, playing right into the formula. The film opens with promising, skewed angles on the city, and there are a few outdoor scenes at the end. But most of it takes place in the gloomy palazzo, more clichéd than spooky, with shadowy staircases inside and a canal out there conveniently located for drowning. The interiors are actually a set in Pinewood Studios, with a production design of drab colors, shot with a muddy look.

In typical Christie mode, the suspects gather together, including the caddish ex-fiancé (Kyle Allen) and Poirot’s Italian bodyguard (Riccardo Scamarcio). Jamie Dornan , who starred as the father in Branagh’s semi-autobiographical Belfast , plays a doctor with PTSD, and Jude Hill, the child who played the young Branagh character there, is his precocious son here. Hill is a genuine talent, a vivid presence onscreen. And Camille Cottin ( Call My Agent ) brings fierce conviction to the role of Rowena’s housekeeper, who used to be a nun. Cottin stands out because so many in the large cast seem to be sleepwalking through it all.  

That doesn’t apply to Branagh, who has always been a perfect fit for the hammy character of Poirot. In each of his Christie films, Branagh brings depth and backstory to the person behind the mustache, with his dark view of humanity. In Venice, more than ever, he seems a touching, lonely figure.  

But depth of character is not the point in this mystery. Of course Poirot eventually says, “No one shall leave until I find who killed her!” and later describes exactly who and what caused multiple deaths. His revelations are not especially surprising, though. As any mystery fan knows, the supposedly least likely suspect is often the killer, and the unsuspenseful Haunting in Venice doesn’t do much to undermine that guess.

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A Haunting in Venice

“A Haunting in Venice” is the best of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot movies. It’s also one of Branagh’s best, period, thanks to the way Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green dismantle and reinvent the source material (Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party )  to create a relentlessly clever, visually dense “old” movie that uses the latest technology. 

Set mainly in a palazzo that seems as immense as Xanadu or Castle Elsinore (it’s a blend of actual Venice locations, London soundstages, and visual effects), the movie is threaded with intimations of supernatural activity, most of the action occurs during a tremendous thunderstorm, and the violence pushes the PG-13 rating to its breaking point. It’s fun with a dark streak: imagine a ghastly gothic cousin of “ Clue ,” or of something like Branagh’s own “ Dead Again ,” which revolved around past lives. At the same time, amid the expected twists and gruesome murders, “A Haunting in Venice” is an empathetic portrayal of the death-haunted mentality of people from Branagh’s parents’ generation who came through World War II with psychic scars, wondering what had been won.  

The original Christie novel was published in 1969 and set in then-present-day Woodleigh Common, England. The adaptation transplants the story to Venice, sets it over 20 years earlier, gives it an international cast of characters thick with British expats, and retains just a few elements, including the violent death of a young girl in the recent past and 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 writing. Aridane tracks down Poirot in a Venice apartment, where he’s retired from detective work and seemingly in existential crisis (though one he’d never discuss without being asked). He seems resolved to a life of aloneness, which is not the same as loneliness. He tells Ariadne he doesn’t have friends and doesn’t need any. 

Ariadne’s sales have slumped, so she draws Poirot back into sleuthing by pushing him to attend a Halloween Night seance at the aforementioned home, hoping to produce material that will give her another hit. The medium is a celebrity in her own right: Joyce Reynolds ( Michelle Yeoh ), a character named after the untrustworthy little girl in the original Christie story who claims to have witnessed a murder. Reynolds plans to communicate with a murder victim, Alicia Drake ( Rowan Robinson ), the teenage daughter of the palazzo’s owner, former opera singer Rowena Drake ( Kelly Reilly ), and hopefully learn who did the deed.

There are, of course, many others gathered in the palazzo. All become suspects in Alicia’s murder as well as the subsequent cover-up killings that ensue in these kinds of stories. Poirot locks himself and the rest of the ensemble in the palazzo and announces that no one can leave until he’s figured things out. The gallery of possibles includes a wartime surgeon named Leslie Ferrier ( Jamie Dornan ) who suffers from severe PTSD; Ferrier’s precocious son Leopold ( Jude Hill , the young lead in Branagh’s “ Belfast “), who is 12 going on 40 and asks unnerving questions; Rowena’s housekeeper Olga Seminoff ( Camille Cottin ); Maxime Gerard ( Kyle Allen ), Alicia’s former boyfriend; and Mrs. Reynolds’ assistants Desdemona and Nicholas Holland ( Emma Laird and Ali Khan ), war refugees who are half-siblings.

It would be unsporting to say much about the rest of the plot. Reading the book won’t give anything important away because—even more so than in Branagh’s previous Poirot films—the kinship between source and adaptation is a bit like the later James Bond films, which might take a title, some character names and locations, and one or two ideas, and invent everything else. Green, who also wrote the recent “ Death on the Nile ” as well as “ Blade Runner 2049 ” and much of the series “American Gods,” is a reliably excellent screenwriter of fresh stories inspired by canonical material. His work keeps one eye on commerce and the other on art. He regularly reminds nostalgia-motivated viewers in the “intellectual property” era of why they like something. At the same time, he introduces provocative new elements and attempts a different tone or focus than audiences probably expected. (The introduction to the movie tie-in paperback of Christie’s novel has an introduction by Green that starts with him confessing to a murder of “the book you are holding.”)

Accordingly, this Poirot mystery aligns itself with popular culture made in Allied countries after World War II. Classic post-war English-language films like “ The Best Years of Our Lives ,” “ The Third Man ,” “The Fallen Idol,” and mid-career Welles films like “ Touch of Evil ” and “The Trial” (to name just a few classics that Branagh seems keenly aware of) were not just engrossing, beautifully crafted entertainments, but illustrations of a pervasive collective feeling of moral exhaustion and soiled idealism—the result of living through a six-year period that showcased previously unimaginable horrors, including Stalingrad, Normandy, the mechanized extermination of the Holocaust, and the use of atomic bombs against civilians. And so the embittered Poirot is a seeming atheist who practically sneers at speaking to the dead. Green and Branagh even give him a monologue about his disillusionment that evokes comments made about Christie near the end of her life, and in the novel, about what she perceived as increasingly cruel tendencies in humanity as a whole, reflected in the sorts of crimes that were being committed.  

Aside from a few period-specific details and references, the source seems to exist outside of the time in which it was written. Branagh and Green’s movie goes in the opposite direction. It’s very much of  the late 1940s. The children in the film 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; in the previous world war, they called it “shell shock.” The plot hinges on the economic desperation of native citizens, previously moneyed expatriates who are too emotionally and often financially shattered to recapture the way of life they had before the war, and the mostly Eastern European refugees who didn’t have much to start with and do the country’s grunt work. The overriding sense is that some of these characters would literally kill to get back to being what they were.

Branagh was compared to Orson Welles early in his career for obvious reasons. He was a wunderkind talent who became internationally famous in his twenties and often starred in projects he originated and oversaw. He had one foot in theater and the other in film. He loved the classics (Shakespeare especially) and popular film genres (including musicals and horror). He had an impresario’s sense of showmanship and the ego to go with it. He’s never been more brazenly Wellesian than he is here. This film has a “big” feeling, as Welles’ films always did, even when they were made for pocket change. But it’s not full of itself, wasteful or pokey; like a Welles film, it gets in and out of every scene as fast as possible, and clocks in at 107 minutes, including credits. 

Film history aficionados may appreciate the many visual acknowledgments of the master’s filmography, including ominous views of Venice that reference Welles’ “Othello” and a screeching cockatoo straight out of “ Citizen Kane .” At times, it feels as if Branagh conducted a seance and channeled Welles’ spirit, as well as that of other directors who worked in a black-and-white, expressionistic, Gothic-flavored, very Wellesian style (including “The Third Man” director Carol Reed and “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Seven Days in May” director John Frankenheimer ). Branagh and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos have also mentioned Richard Brooks’s 1967 adaptation of “ In Cold Blood ” and Masaki Kobayashi’s “Kwaidan” as influences. The movie deploys fish-eye lenses, dutch tilts, hilariously ominous close-ups of significant objects (including a creepy cuckoo clock), extreme low- and high-angles, and deep-focus compositions that arrange the actors from foreground to deep background, with window and door frames, sections of furniture, and sometimes actors’ bodies dicing 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 (albeit in IMAX resolution) and lets the medium be what it naturally is. The low-light interior scenes make no attempt to simulate film stock, depriving viewers of that “comfort food” feeling that comes from seeing a movie set in the past that uses actual film or tries for a “film look.” The result is unbalancing, in a fascinating way. The images have a mesmerizing hyper-clarity and a shimmering, otherworldly aspect. In tight close-ups of actors, their eyes seem to have been lit from within.  

Branagh and editor Lucy Donaldson time the cuts so that the more ostentatious images (such as a rat crawling out of a stone gargoyle’s mouth, and Poirot and Ariadne seen through the metal screen of a fireplace, flames in the foreground) are on-screen just long enough for the viewer to register what they see, and laugh at how far the movie is willing to go for the effect. Movies are rarely directed in this style anymore, in any format, and it’s a shame, because when they are, the too-muchness can be intoxicating.

Available in theaters on September 15th. 

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

• Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot
• Kyle Allen as Maxime Gerard
• Camille Cottin as Olga Seminoff
• Jamie Dornan as Dr Leslie Ferrier
• Tina Fey as Ariadne Oliver
• Jude Hill as Leopold Ferrier
• Ali Khan as Nicholas Holland
• Emma Laird as Desdemona Holland
• Kelly Reilly as Rowena Drake
• Michelle Yeoh as Joyce Reynolds
• Dylan Corbett-Bader as Baker
• Amir El-Masry as Alessandro Longo
• Fernando Piloni as Vincenzo Di Stefano

Writer (based upon the novel "Hallowe'en Party" by)

• Agatha Christie

Cinematographer

• Haris Zambarloukos
• Hildur Guðnadóttir
• Kenneth Branagh
• Lucy Donaldson
• Michael Green

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Review: With ‘A Haunting in Venice,’ Kenneth Branagh’s Agatha Christie series hits its stride

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Early on in Kenneth Branagh’s delectably creepy “A Haunting in Venice,” as gondolas cut through waterways and the sun sets on one of the world’s most impossibly beautiful cities, there arises a melody that you might recognize as “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis.” It’s a welcome if incongruous choice of music, evoking a bright, cheery vision of early 20th-century America that is otherwise absent from the movie, which is set over a dark and stormy Halloween night in 1947 Italy. In time, though, the allusion will click into place, when a character reminisces about a time during the war when she sought refuge in the 1944 film “Meet Me in St. Louis” over and over again — a poignant testament to how movies can sustain us through our darkest hours.

But there’s more to the allusion than the usual fusty Hollywood nostalgia. “Meet Me in St. Louis,” rightly hailed as a Christmas classic, also happens to feature one hell of a Halloween sequence, where unruly, unsupervised children attack their neighbors, build bonfires in the street and at one point nearly derail a trolley car. That spirit of youthful anarchy makes it a clever reference point for “A Haunting in Venice,” which is very loosely adapted from Agatha Christie’s 1969 novel “Hallowe’en Party,” and which is particularly concerned with the mischievous doings of children, alive and dead.

The action unfolds at a crumbling Venetian palazzo that’s rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of girls and boys who perished years ago during an outbreak of the plague. That makes it a supremely atmospheric setting for a children’s All Hallows’ Eve gathering, though the main event here is the (mostly) adults-only after-party. The owner of the palazzo, a grieving opera soprano named Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly, a master of melancholy), has invited a famous medium, Mrs. Joyce Reynolds (an entrancing Michelle Yeoh) to perform a séance. Their hope is to establish contact with the spirit of Rowena’s daughter, Alicia, who plunged to her death in the canal a year earlier, a tragedy that dovetails with the many before it and portends still more to come.

Into this house of horrors comes the famed Belgian detective and designated party-pooper Hercule Poirot (Branagh), who’s retired from official duty but still willing to take on cases that interest him — or, in this case, offend his strict rationalist instincts. Tricks and treats for the entertainment of small children are all well and good, but for Poirot, the notion of actual occult phenomena is as intolerable as an asymmetrical breakfast spread or an unkempt mustache. And the filmmakers seem to take a particular joy in irritating him this time around, seizing on the cozy tropes of the classical detective story and steering them, with jolting sound effects and grisly imagery, in the direction of full-throttle supernatural horror.

The pleasure proves infectious. Gorgeously shot on location by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, “A Haunting in Venice” is easily the best of Branagh’s three big-screen Christie adaptations, largely because it is also the most flagrantly unfaithful. If the earlier “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017) and “Death on the Nile” (2022) felt like lavish but superfluous retreads of beloved Christie classics, here, Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green have wisely dispensed with, and ultimately improved on, one of Poirot’s least memorable cases. In “Hallowe’en Party,” a 13-year-old girl is found drowned in an apple-bobbing tub; for the movie, it’s Poirot himself who is nearly pomme -eled to death, assailed from behind by a killer whose ruthlessness is less surprising than their identity.

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The victims, suspects, motives and complications pile up swiftly but lucidly. Rowena’s guests, not all of whom were invited, include an angry chef (Kyle Allen), a watchful bodyguard (Riccardo Scamarcio), two shifty Hungarian travelers (Ali Khan and Emma Laird), a troubled doctor and his precocious son (Jamie Dornan and Jude Hill, poignantly updating their parent-child dynamic from Branagh’s “Belfast” ). There’s also an intensely religious housekeeper (a tremulous Camille Cottin) who, like Yeoh’s wide-eyed mystic, mounts a fervent, faith-based explanation for the eerie goings-on at the palazzo, where children’s singsong voices issue forth from the darkness and chandeliers fall and windows burst open of their own accord.

Poirot reacts to all this legerdemain with a disbelieving scowl, even when he can’t fully explain the hair-raising tricks his eyes and ears are playing on him. He is joined in his skepticism, up to a point, by his longtime friend Ariadne Oliver (a very welcome Tina Fey), a successful mystery novelist who functioned in the books as a self-parodying avatar for Christie herself. That dynamic plays out differently here, partly because the character has been recast as an American. Enlivened by Fey’s vinegary wit and Green’s acerbic dialogue, this Miss Oliver is a snappier, more sardonic presence, keeping Poirot’s sizable ego in check even as she tries to lure him out of super-sleuth retirement. She wants to reawaken his sense of purpose and also perhaps her own, to find fresh creative inspiration in an adventure replete with violent death and gothic splendor.

Branagh certainly succeeds in finding his, as do his gifted collaborators (they include production designer John Paul Kelly and costume designer Sammy Sheldon). Filming on location in Venice, of course, has long been a reliable source of cinematic ensorcellment; if it is possible to shoot an unattractive or unevocative frame of this city, Zambarloukos hasn’t managed it. He and Branagh retain their fondness for extremely canted angles, but here those visual flourishes — a sideways-slanted shot of a piazza, an upward-gazing shot of an open doorway — serve to underscore the spookiness of the setting, the sense of madness that seeps into the air like poison. This is a world whose secret passageways and pitch-black shadows you can get all too happily lost in.

With its paranormal activity and seemingly impossible crimes (including a murder in a locked room), “A Haunting in Venice” sometimes feels closer to the work of the great John Dickson Carr than Christie, even if the solution to the mystery, though clever and convincing, falls short of those authors’ signature ingenuity. What lingers from this movie isn’t the usual assemblage of clues and red herrings — a child’s doll, a jar of honey, a hidden telephone — but a free-floating air of grief, much of it rooted in the characters’ turbulent memories of the war just a few years earlier.

Branagh’s Poirot, himself a World War I veteran, has bared his own physical and psychological scars in this series before. For the first time, though, his backstory doesn’t feel concocted for effect. Instead, it subtly resonates with a case whose rich human dimensions — deferred dreams, unshakable traumas, grieving parents and children — sound a grim echo of the world beyond the whodunit. For all the creakily derivative supernatural hokum on display, the ghosts that haunt this movie turn out to be all too persuasively real.

'A Haunting in Venice'

Rating: PG-13, for some strong violence, disturbing images and thematic elements Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes Playing: Opens Sept. 15 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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The big twist in 'A Haunting in Venice'? It's actually a great film

Justin Chang

Tina Fey and Michelle Yeoh join Kenneth Branagh in A Haunting in Venice. Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection hide caption

Tina Fey and Michelle Yeoh join Kenneth Branagh in A Haunting in Venice.

You can always count on Agatha Christie for a surprise, and the big twist in A Haunting in Venice is that it's actually a pretty terrific movie.

I say this as a die-hard Christie fan who didn't much care for Kenneth Branagh 's earlier adaptations of Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. Charming as he was in the role of Hercule Poirot, the movies themselves felt like lavish but superfluous retreads of two of the author's best-known classics.

One of the lessons of A Haunting in Venice is that sometimes, it's a good idea to go with weaker source material. Christie's 1969 novel Hallowe'en Party is one of her thinner whodunits, and Branagh and his screenwriter, Michael Green, have smartly overhauled the story, which is now set in 1947 Venice. They've also gleefully embraced the Halloween theme, taking the cozy conventions of the detective story and pushing them in the direction of a full-blown haunted-house thriller.

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OK, so the result isn't exactly Don't Look Now , the most richly atmospheric horror movie ever shot in Venice. But Branagh and his collaborators, especially the cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos and the production designer John Paul Kelly, have clearly fallen under the spell of one of the world's most beautiful and cinematically striking cities. While there are the expectedly scenic shots of gondolas and canals at sunset, most of the action takes place after dark at a magnificent palazzo owned by a famed opera singer, played by Kelly Reilly.

She's hosting a lavish Halloween party, where Poirot is one of the guests, tagging along with his longtime American friend, Ariadne Oliver, a popular mystery novelist played with snappy wit by Tina Fey . Also in attendance are Jamie Dornan as a troubled doctor and an entrancing Michelle Yeoh as a medium, known as "the unholy Mrs. Reynolds," who says she can speak to the dead.

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Mrs. Reynolds performs a séance, hoping to contact the spirit of the opera singer's daughter, who died under mysterious circumstances at the palazzo a year earlier. Soon another death will take place: One of the party guests turns up murdered, and while Poirot is officially retired, he decides to take on the case. He even asks his mystery-writer friend, Miss Oliver, to help him interview suspects, though not before first questioning her about her whereabouts at the time of the killing.

As Poirot, Branagh is clearly having so much fun wearing that enormous mustache and speaking in that droll French accent that it's been hard not to enjoy his company, even when the movies have been lackluster. For once, though, the case he's investigating is just as pleasurable to get lost in.

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It's an unusually spooky story: The palazzo, we find out early on, is rumored to be haunted by the vengeful ghosts of children who died there years ago during an outbreak of the plague. Branagh piles on the freaky visuals and jolting sound effects, to the point where even a supreme skeptic like Poirot begins to question what's going on. These horror elements may be unabashedly creaky and derivative, but they work because the movie embraces them to the hilt.

A Haunting in Venice sometimes feels closer to the work of Christie's undersung contemporary John Dickson Carr, whose brilliant detective stories often flirted with the possibility of the supernatural. That said, the actual solution to the mystery, while clever enough, isn't especially ingenious or complicated.

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What gives the story its deeper resonance is its potent sense of time and place. It's just two years after the end of World War II, and many of the suspects have witnessed unspeakable horrors. The medium, Mrs. Reynolds, was a nurse during the war, which may account for why she feels such an affinity for the dead. Everyone, from the grieving opera singer to the doctor traumatized by his memories, seems to be mourning some kind of loss.

In Branagh's retelling, Poirot is himself a World War I veteran. One of the reasons he's such a staunch atheist is that he's seen too much cruelty and suffering to believe that God exists. He doesn't exactly change his mind by the end of A Haunting in Venice . But it's a testament to this movie's poignancy that Poirot emerges from his retirement with a renewed belief that he can still do some good in the world. He's eagerly looking forward to his next case, and so, to my delight, am I.

‘Death on the Nile’ Review: Gal Gadot Shines, and Kenneth Branagh Ups His Agatha Christie Game

Branagh's second Christie thriller, in which he once again plays Hercule Poirot as a wry dyspeptic noodge, sharpens the tension on 2017's "Murder on the Orient Express."

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Agatha Christie was born in 1890, and the heyday of movie adaptations of her novels goes quite a ways back (like, 70 or 80 years). The whole structure and flavor of this sort of delectably engineered whodunit, with its cast of suspects drawn in deliberate broad strokes and its know-it-all detective whose powers of deduction descend directly from Sherlock Holmes, is rooted in the cozy symmetry of the studio-system era. The last big-screen Christie adaptation that could be considered an all-out success, critically and commercially, was probably Sidney Lumet’s 1974 “ Murder on the Orient Express ,” a lavishly corny and irresistible amusement in which Albert Finney played the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot as a fussbudget egomaniac with pursed lips and hair that resembled an oil slick (he was like Inspector Clouseau with a brain transplant).

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“Murder on the Orient Express” was actually an event movie (it received half a dozen Oscar nominations, and Ingrid Bergman even won). But the Christie adaptations that followed — “ Death on the Nile ” (1978), “The Mirror Crack’d” (1980), “Evil Under the Sun” (1982) — were half-baked suspense films that felt, collectively, like the fading embers of a genre. In recent decades, the Christie formula has seemed more at home on television (e.g., the British “Miss Marple” series), where it has come off as less hermetic and precious — that is, until Kenneth Branagh picked up the gauntlet for his 2017 remake of “Murder on the Orient Express.” That picture was something of a mixed bag: sterling production values, a puckish sense of play, not enough tension to an overly familiar mystery. But Branagh, acting from behind a mustache so extended it seemed to have its own geological layers, invested Poirot with a wry dyspeptic noodginess.

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“Death on the Nile,” based on Christie’s 1937 novel, is essentially Branagh’s sequel to that film, and I was eager to see if he could tighten the screws on his version of the Christie genre. He does. The new film is crisper and craftier than “Murder on the Orient Express”; it’s a moderately diverting dessert that carries you right along. It never transcends the feeling that you’re seeing a relic injected with life serum, but that, in a way, is part of its minor-league charm.

Apart from Branagh, the first star of “Death on the Nile” is the Nile. Early on, the Egyptian locations feel a touch synthetic — you can tell the Pyramids are CGI — but by the time the characters are wandering through the dusty nooks and crannies of Abu Simbel, the massive riverside temple carved out of a cliff as a monument to King Ramesses II, it becomes a backdrop of arresting majesty. The second star is the S.S. Karnak, the sprawling, two-tiered riverboat steamer that’s hosting a dozen luxury vacationers. Full of passageways and compartments, it’s a paragon of 1930s wealth porn and a better, more elaborate vehicle for suspense than the Orient Express. The third star is a vengeful aristocratic love triangle, which succeeds at engaging us in the drama that precedes the murder, so that the foul play can then sharpen the tension.

At a London nightclub, the vampish heiress Linnet Ridgeway, played by Gal Gadot with a vivacious spark she hasn’t always shown outside the “Wonder Woman” films, takes a spin on the dance floor with Simon Doyle ( Armie Hammer ), the fiancé of her best friend, Jacqueline (Emma Mackey). The three then show up on the Karnak — only Linnet and Simon are now married and on their honeymoon, while the jealous, betrayed Jacqueline has become their stalker. She’s toting a .22 caliber handgun, along with an ace motivation for murder.

I won’t reveal who gets killed, but the fact that we actively miss that person works for the movie. So does Hammer’s performance as the wily, arrogant, exceedingly tan Simon — the actor’s presence in the film, after accusations of abuse were leveled against him, has been considered problematic, but it must be said that he pops onscreen more than most of the other actors.

Branagh updates details like some telltale red paint, but he keeps the original story intact. “Death on the Nile” lopes along pleasantly enough, feeding on Poirot’s prickly drive to solve the mystery. In one interrogation, he gets seriously addled, a sign that Branagh wants us to take the detective’s obsessiveness seriously. The other sign is that he’s given Poirot a melancholy romantic subplot, which may be asking us to take him a little too  seriously.

The plot touches on such detours as a Tiffany necklace worthy of Liz Taylor and a blue-suited doctor with jealousy issues of his own, though he’s so stoic about it that you may do a triple take when you realize the actor playing him is Russell Brand. It all comes together in the scene where Poirot gathers the suspects and solves the crime. For about 10 minutes, the movie take wing, which is what you want from an Agatha Christie movie. Then again, the scene may remind you that there’s a movie not  based on Agatha Christie that so channels her spirit it’s effectively the best Christie film in half a century: “Knives Out.” “Death on the Nile,” decent as it is, can’t touch that film’s fusion of wit, excitement, and old-school whodunit glee. That’s not really a knock on Branagh. It’s just that once you’ve experienced Agatha Christie 2.0, it’s hard to go back.

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, New York, Jan. 25, 2022. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 127 MIN.

• Production: A 20th Century Studios release of a TSG Entertainment, Kinberg Genre, Scott Free Productions, The Mark Gordon Company production. Producers: Ridley Scott, Kevin J. Walsh, Kenneth Branagh, Judy Hofflund. Executive producers: Mark Gordon, Simon Kinberg, Matthew Jenkins, James Prichard, Matthew Prichard.
• Crew: Director: Kenneth Branagh. Screenplay: Michael Green. Camera: Haris Zambarloukos. Editor: Úna Ni Dhonghaíle. Music: Patrick Doyle.
• With: Kenneth Branagh, Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, Emma Mackey, Annette Bening, Tom Bateman, Ali Fazal, Russell Brand, Sophie Okonedo, Letitia Wright, Dawn French.

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Death on the Nile

While on vacation on the Nile, Hercule Poirot must investigate the murder of a young heiress. While on vacation on the Nile, Hercule Poirot must investigate the murder of a young heiress. While on vacation on the Nile, Hercule Poirot must investigate the murder of a young heiress.

• Kenneth Branagh
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• Agatha Christie
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• Annette Bening
• 1.2K User reviews
• 293 Critic reviews
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• 1 win & 9 nominations

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• Euphemia Bouc

• Hercule Poirot

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• Salome and Rosalie Otterbourne, a romance novelist and her daughter, become a singer and her niece/manager.
• Andrew Pennington becomes cousin Andrew Katchadourian.
• Marie Van Schuyler, a socialite and no relation to Linnet, becomes Linnet's godmother who has the ideals of Mr. Ferguson, the aristocrat turned socialist.
• Windlesham, a character mentioned in the first chapter, is combined with Dr. Bessner to become Dr./Lord Windlesham.
• Bouc, a character who appears only in Murder on the Orient Express, takes on elements of Col. Race, while his choice of traveling companion, his mother Euphemia, is reminiscent of the relationship between Tim and Mrs. Allerton.
• Goofs Poirot grows a mustache to hide the scar tissue that covers most of his upper lip and cheek. Scar tissue cannot grow hair at all, as it does not contain follicles or sweat glands; it is a connective tissue that grows between the dermis after it is split. Poirot's mustache could therefore never be as full as depicted, and should have several holes or irregularities.

Marie Van Schuyler : You accuse me now of murder?

Bouc : Oh, no, he accuses everyone of murder.

Hercule Poirot : It is a problem, I admit.

• Connections Featured in Chris Stuckmann Movie Reviews: Death on the Nile (2022)
• Soundtracks That's All (Live) Written and Performed by Sister Rosetta Tharpe Courtesy of Institut National de L'Audiovisuel

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• $90,000,000 (estimated)
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‘A Haunting in Venice’ Review: A Supernatural Twist Can’t Energize Kenneth Branagh’s Lethargic Hercule Poirot

Christian zilko.

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Kenneth Branagh ‘s Hercule Poirot series — which began with 2017’s “Murder on the Orient Express” and continued with last year’s superior “Death on the Nile” — has emerged as a straightforward alternative for mystery purists turned off by the flashiness of the “Knives Out” films. While Johnson keeps reminding us that murder mysteries are living, breathing entities that can push narrative boundaries and make us laugh and think (while occasionally being too online for their own good), Branagh’s faithful adaptations of Agatha Christie classics function as a control group making the case that the genre was doing just fine for the past century. Having both franchises running at the same time has benefitted both old and new mystery fans — the world gets to observe Christie’s ongoing influence on pop culture while revisiting her best works. Related Stories Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘The Bride!’ Will Have ‘Big Dance Numbers’ and Singing, Says Peter Sarsgaard Nicole Kidman’s Performance in ‘Babygirl’ Fully Satisfies Venice Premiere Crowd 

Branagh launched his series with Christie’s most obvious starting points, kicking things off with her best-selling “Orient Express” before adapting her beloved “Death on the Nile” (which came with a campy hook about a cruise ship carrying enough champagne to fill the eponymous river). But while Christie’s massive bibliography contains enough quality mysteries to fill several lifetimes of filmmaking, there wasn’t a third novel with comparable obvious name recognition. So Branagh got creative for his third film , taking Christie’s Gothic-tinged mystery “Hallowe’en Party” and moving the setting from England to Italy to make “ A Haunting in Venice .”

Without the intellectual stimulation of solving crimes, he has to find other ways to keep his brain sharp. When his old friend Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a mystery novelist whose knack for puzzles rivals his own, invites him to a Halloween party to help her expose a grifting psychic, he soon finds himself attending a post-soiree seance at a Gothic manor that has been the site of unimaginable tragedies. The party’s hosts have spent years grieving the suicide of their young daughter, who fell to her death from one of the tower’s highest windows. The unexpected death tore the extended family apart, prompting brutal divorces and crippling mental health problems for her father.

It’s unsurprising that the parents have taken comfort in “communicating” with their late daughter through the psychic communications of alleged medium Joyce Reynolds (a predictably stylish Michelle Yeoh). But it doesn’t take long for Poirot to spot an assistant hiding in the chimney and expose her act as a fraud. The aging detective takes the opportunity to soliloquize about his distaste for psychics who prey on vulnerable people for money and state his disbelief in supernatural events.

On paper, “A Haunting in Venice” has all the components of a great whodunnit. A star-studded cast solving a Gothic mystery in one of Europe’s most beautiful cities should be enough to entice any Christie devotee. But no amount of star power can compensate for the fact that no one seems to be having any fun. Yeoh makes a commendable effort to craft a three-dimensional femme fatale, but the rest of the cast seems content to put on a melodrama with all the excitement of a jigsaw puzzle called “The Wheat Field.”

Despite the franchises’ obvious differences, it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the shadow that the “Knives Out” movies cast over Branagh’s self-described “Christie-verse.” While you certainly can’t hate a movie for differing from an unrelated director’s vision, stuffy adaptations like “A Haunting in Venice” seem even stuffier when Johnson is constantly reminding us how much of the genre’s uncharted territory is waiting to be explored.

“A Haunting in Venice” opens in theaters on Friday, September 15.

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A Haunting in Venice

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Watch A Haunting in Venice with a subscription on Hulu, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

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A darker and spookier spin on Branagh's Poirot, A Haunting in Venice is a decent Halloween snack whose undemanding mystery gets a lift from nifty visuals and an all-star cast.

A Haunting in Venice is an entertaining mystery that's just scary enough -- as long as you're able to stick with it after a slow start.

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Kenneth Branagh

Hercule Poirot

Ariadne Oliver

Camille Cottin

Olga Seminoff

Riccardo Scamarcio

Vitale Portfoglio

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Rowena Drake

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Review: A Haunting in Venice (2023)

Last Updated on December 20, 2023

With “A Haunting in Venice” (2023), director and star Kenneth Branagh has found a potent approach to Agatha Christie, producing a feature-length murder mystery with several juicy twists in the richly atmospheric setting of Venice in 1947.

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For his first two outings as Hercule Poirot, Kenneth Branagh selected two of Agatha Christie’s most famous novels: Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile .

Branagh’s third Christie film is based on a lesser-known, late-career story, which has never made it to the big screen until now. This turns out to be a smart strategy, as few viewers will know the identity of the killer ahead of time in “A Haunting in Venice.” And the casting in this film is shrewder as well.

“A Haunting in Venice” (2023) is AVAILABLE to STREAM

Rated PG-13

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When “A Haunting in Venice” (2023) begins, Poirot is attempting to retire in Italy, with little success. He’s troubled by nightmares during the night and would-be clients pleading for his detection services during the day. Poirot seems relieved when a friend turns up, Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a successful author of a mystery series featuring a Finnish detective.

Mrs. Oliver has a challenge: She claims to have witnessed a medium connect with the dead at a séance in ways she can’t explain. “I’m the smartest person I ever met and I can’t figure it out, so I came to the second,” she says.

The medium in question, Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), will preside over a Halloween séance at a Venetian palazzo owned by an opera singer, Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly). Mrs. Oliver persuades Poirot to accompany her to the palazzo that night, to see if he can debunk the spiritualist.

The palazzo turns out to be a place with tragic secrets. Mrs. Drake’s grown daughter, Alicia Drake (Rowan Robinson), committed suicide by jumping off a balcony and plunging into the canal. In the weeks before she died, she said she was tormented by the ghosts of dead children who were imprisoned long ago in the palazzo.

We learn the legend of the doomed children from a storyteller at a youngster’s Halloween party. Once the children have gone home, the adults gather in Alicia’s bedroom. Present is a mentally ill doctor and friend of the family, Dr. Leslie Ferrier (Jamie Dornan), along with his precocious son, Leopold (Jude Hill). We also have the devoutly Catholic housekeeper, Olga Seminoff (Camille Cottin), and Alicia’s ex-fiance, Maxime Gerard (Kyle Allen), who was invited but no one knows by whom.

Poirot applies his formidable brain to the problem of the medium’s powers and seems to have solved it, but that is just the start of the story. Shortly after the séance, someone tries to kill Poirot and several minutes later, someone is found murdered in the palazzo. The rest of the film is taken up with Poirot trying to solve the mystery.

With the third Poirot film, there is none of the epic sweep of Branagh’s “ Murder on the Orient Express ” or “ Death on the Nile .” Since the effects of the cross-continent train ride, and the trip to Egypt, were achieved through obvious CGI, that is for the best. In this film, the focus is on very few locations in Venice, most of which takes place at night. This is just the right environment for a mystery with a touch of the supernatural. The sharply angled camera shots reveal shadowy corridors, grim gardens, and dusty passageways that remind one that Branagh was very effective in the suspenseful 1991 film “ Dead Again ,” co-starring his then-wife, Emma Thompson.

While the very American Tina Fey is not wholly convincing as a writer of 30 mysteries, she has a light touch and proves a good standby and sounding board for Poirot—almost serving as a Colonel Hastings.

The best performance in “A Haunting in Venice” is given by Michelle Yeoh as the medium. Several of the characters in the movie are haunted by the past, stricken by family loss or the horrors of World War II, but the expression in Yeoh’s eyes and the richness in her voice convince you that this is a woman who has seen darkness. It’s enough to make a chill race up your spine.

In his earlier films as Poirot, Kenneth Branagh has lacked the grand eccentricity of Albert Finney (Orient Express), the warmth of Peter Ustinov (Nile), or the portly, fussy charm of David Suchet, who inhabited Poirot for many seasons on television. Branagh’s Poirot, despite being a gourmand, which is one of the Belgian detective’s famous traits, is slender. His only distinguishing feature is his large mustache.

In “A Haunting in Venice,” Branagh has created a more relatable Poirot. He is disgusted by the profession of mediumship, known to exploit the sadness of the grieving. After he has been attacked, he is understandably angry. But while investigating, he becomes unsettled by voices and fleeting visions. In other words, we have a vulnerable Hercule Poirot here, and it works in this film. “A Haunting in Venice” makes for a deliciously eerie evening in front of the television.

For a more faithful counterpoint, watch the television version of Christie’s original novel. “ Hallowe’en Party ” (2010), the second episode of “Poirot” in Season 12, is set in the English country village of Woodleigh Common. A murder is committed after a young girl announces at a Halloween party, “I once saw a murder but I didn’t know it!”

A back-to-back watch is not only fun, but illuminates what this interpretation and Branagh’s film have in common (bobbing for apples is critical to both adaptations), and where they divide (there’s no hint of Venice or seances in Hallowe’en Party).

For those who enjoy Agatha Christie, both adaptations of her story are well worth seeing.

Nancy Bilyeau is the author of seven historical novels. Her latest is The Orchid Hour , set in 1923 New York. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, saying, “Historical mystery fans will find this irresistible.” To learn more, go to nancybilyeau.com.

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to see  The Period Films List , with the best British, historical and costume dramas sorted by era. You’ll also want to see our reviews of “ Agatha and the Truth of Murder ” (2018) and “ Death on the Nile ” (2004), as well as the television special “ Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen ” (2023).

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Agatha Christie’s Murder Is Easy’ On BritBox, Where A Man Investigates Murders In A British Village

Where to stream:.

• Agatha Christie's Murder is Easy
• agatha christie

‘Agatha Christie’s Murder Is Easy’ Exclusive Clip: A Body Is Found In BritBox’s New Adaptation Of Agatha Christie’s Novel

Stream it or skip it: ‘death and other details’ on hulu, where an old detective and a young woman solve a murder on a cruise ship, stream it or skip it: ‘a haunting in venice’ on hulu, kenneth branagh’s creepy riff on agatha christie, stream it or skip it: ‘see how they run’ on hulu, a fizzy, self-aware murder-mystery bolstered by an endearing saoirse ronan performance.

We’ve said it many times, but it’s worth repeating: We’re amazed at how enduring Agatha Christie ‘s novels have been given that she wrote her final novel in 1973. The mysteries she wrote have not only become a template for modern mysteries to follow, but the stories themselves have been easily modified — whether it’s story elements or the setting — for modern tastes. A new adaptation takes an 85-year-old Christie novel and makes it relatable to modern-day viewers, simply by making a change to the main character.

AGATHA CHRISTIE’S MURDER IS EASY : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man stares at a stretch of woods, then looks behind him. He holds a wooden statue. Then he starts running.

The Gist: The man drops the wooden figure and sees it catch on fire. Then we see that Luke Fitzwilliam (David Jonsson) is thinking about that moment while on a ship taking him to England from his home country of Nigeria. On the train to London, an older woman named Lavinia Pinkerton (Penelope Wilton) gets on and sits across from him. She finds out that he was an attaché for a British government representative, and when his boss got a job in the governmental hub in Whitehall, Fitzwilliam decided to follow.

Miss Pinkerton talks to Fitzwilliam about how she’s going to London to report a series of homicides in her home village of Wychwood-under-Ashe. The people in town are dismissing them as accidents, but she knows who actually killed them. “Murder is easy for a certain type of person,” Pinkerton tells him when he asks how that person has not been discovered.

When they disembark in London, on the day of the Epson Derby, she tells him to make a bet on a 40-1 horse. She picks more winners than losers, and the longshot she picked came from behind to win. When he goes to give her her winnings, though, Pinkerton is hit by a car that kills her and speeds away.

He wants to give the money to someone back in Wychwood-under-Ashe, and he feels that Pinkerton’s death was murder. So, with a few days before he starts his new job, he takes the train up to the village; the first place he goes is the inquest into the deaths of the two victims Pinkerton talked about; the first person he meets is Bridget Conway (Morfydd Clark); he tells her he’s a cultural anthropologist doing a book on superstitions.

When he’s invited to a dinner held by Lord Whitfield (Tom Riley), whose family founded the village, he finds out that Bridget is the aristocrat’s fiancée and that she invited him. Putting up with the various racial biases from the guests — Whitfield thinks Fitzwilliam grew up in a “mud hut” in Nigeria — he tells the horrified guests that Pinkerton was killed.

He decides to remain in town to investigate further, thinking that the person who killed the other people killed Pinkerton. But as more people die, he starts to zero in on Dr. Thomas (Mathew Baynton), the village’s physician, who seems to give a different level of care to the town’s wealthy than he does to its working class population, and seems to ascribe to a philosophy that Fitzwilliam finds abhorrent. In the meantime, Bridget, intrigued by Fitzwilliam and the reason why he’s really in town, helps him with the investigation.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? How many hours of Agatha Christie adaptations are on BritBox and various other streaming outlets? Millions, as it turns out , so we’ll pick two recent adaptations for comparison: The ABC Murders and Ordeal By Innocence .

Our Take: By making the main character of Agatha Christie’s Murder Is Easy , Luke Fitzwilliam, from Nigeria, Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre, who adapted the 2-part series from Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel , changes the dynamics of the show quite a bit. The original Fitzwilliam was stationed in India, but is decidedly white. This version of Fitzwilliam has to battle with not fitting in pretty much anywhere he goes, and he’s immediately viewed with suspicion in a place like Wychwood-under-Asche.

That aspect of the adaptation gives the story’s haves-vs.-have-nots theme a bit more depth. The story becomes more than just about the village’s working class population being picked off one-by-one and the wealthy members of the town being dismissive and uncaring about those deaths. It’s about how Fitzwilliam itself fits in that structure. When he hangs out with his fellow West Africans in London, more than one of them point out how he’s Anglicized himself, but to most of the people he’s around, he represents what used to be called “The Dark Continent” by the various European colonizers who occupied Nigeria and other countries.

So, even though the series takes place in the early 1950s (about 15 years after its original setting), making Fitzwilliam Nigerian immediately modernizes the story. Jonsson communicates Fitzwilliam’s confidence in spite of the obstacles he faces on a daily basis.

The story is a bit heavy on talking and light on murder in the first hour, to the point where things start to drag a bit. Some of the side characters, like Reverend Humbleby (Mark Bonnar), the town vicar, and his family, are a bit underdeveloped. But that’s generally how all Christie mysteries go. Some of the group are suspects, some are victims. Things don’t really gel between Fitzwilliam and Bridget until close to the end of the first hour, where they start to pull together in trying to get somewhere with the investigation, but the chemistry between Jonsson and Clark is fun to watch.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Another village resident becomes a victim, this being one that straddles both the working class and wealthy populations of the town. Sleeper Star: Mark Bonnar, who plays Reverend Humblebly, always has an understated but significant presence in whatever he does, which we’ve been noticing at least since he stole scenes in Catastrophe .

Most Pilot-y Line: The “mud hut” line was pretty cringeworthy, but Fitzwilliam does get his comeuppance when he points out that his family were landowners in Nigeria. It might be a way for Ejiwunmi-Le Berre to point out the not-so-subtle racism in much of Christie’s work.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Agatha Christie’s Murder Is Easy modernizes an 85-year-old text simply by changing the nationality of its main character, and it makes the story a whole lot less creaky as a result.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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‘Death on the Nile’ Review: Dead in the Water

Kenneth Branagh’s second adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories forgets the simple pleasures of ensemble excess and pure messing about.

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By Nicolas Rapold

The trickiest part of a murder mystery isn’t solving the crime. It’s keeping the intrigue and fun alive until then. “Death on the Nile,” Kenneth Branagh’s second adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories, forgets the simple pleasures of ensemble excess and pure messing about.

After Poirot’s lavish origin story set in World War I, we’re whisked away to a London music club with some spicy dancing, and then to an Egyptian wedding holiday. There, a love triangle fans the flames for a blowup. The preening heiress Linnet (Gal Gadot) and her beau, Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer) can’t shake Simon’s lurker ex, Jacqueline (Emma Mackey), who follows them onto the fateful Nile riverboat.

As in many Christie screen adaptations (this one written by Michael Green), a motley bunch awaits accusation on board. The former comedy duo Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French reunite as Linnet’s socialite godmother and companion. Sophie Okonedo and Letitia Wright play Salome, a blues singer, and her business-savvy daughter (a nice reimagining of Angela Lansbury’s Salome, a tippling erotic novelist in the 1978 version ). There’s also a criminally underused Annette Bening as a painter, and Russell Brand as a doleful doctor.

But their byplay remains rather airless, except for Okonedo, Mackey and Thomas Bateman as Poirot’s hapless, vaguely Wodehousian pal. Round and round Poirot goes, as does the circling camerawork, before he performs the reliably satisfying triple-axel-twisty feat of exegesis in front of the suspects.

More often than not, Branagh’s Poirot simply lacks personality, and the film’s absolutely smoldering epilogue oozes more mood than all the rest put together.

Death on the Nile Rated PG-13 for violence (it’s a murder mystery) and sexual material. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters.

A Haunting in Venice: release date, cast, plot, trailer and everything we know

A Haunting in Venice stars Kenneth Branagh in his third Poirot mystery.

A Haunting in Venice is the third Hercule Poirot mystery starring Kenneth Branagh as Agatha Christie's brilliant Belgian detective.

Having already cracked Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022) , Poirot will this time use his famous "little grey cells" in Italy.

Billed as "an unsettling supernatural thriller", the makers say the tale is inspired by Christie's novel, "Hallowe’en Party". 

Speaking about the movie, star and director Kenneth Branagh says: "This is a fantastic development of the character Hercule Poirot, as well as the Agatha Christie franchise. 

"Based on a complex, little-known tale of mystery set at Halloween in a pictorially ravishing city, it is an amazing opportunity for us, as filmmakers, and we are relishing the chance to deliver something truly spine-chilling for our loyal movie audiences."

Christie's great-grandson and A Haunting in Venice' s executive producer James Prichard told Total Film he welcomed the move into the paranormal in the new movie. He said: "If we are going to continue to make these films, we can't do the same thing over and over. A departure at this point is possibly risky, but it also has the potential to keep it alive, bring in a different audience, and so do something interesting that will hopefully surprise and delight."

A trailer and a fab poster have now been released for the movie.

In our A Haunting in Venice review , we concluded: "Drawing inspiration from a collection of Christie short stories that touch on the supernatural, The Last Seance, Branagh and Green create nerve-tingling tension from the clash between Poirot’s world of logic and a very different world that may contain ghosts and ghoulish goings on. 

"Add director of photography Harris Zambarloukos’s titled camera angles and it’s no wonder we feel eerily off balance. The film’s Venetian backdrop works superbly, too, and is a lot more convincing than Death on the Nile’s fake-looking blue-screen Egypt. Rowena’s palazzo may have been created in a Pinewood studio but, like the film itself, it is effectively creepy and chilling. Woo-woo? Maybe. Whoo-hoo! Definitely." 

Here's everything we know about Poitot number 3, A Haunting in Venice …

 A Haunting in Venice release date

A Haunting in Venice was released on September 15, 2023, in the US and UK. See our new movies in 2023 guide for more films coming soon.

A Haunting in Venice plot

The plot is inspired by Agatha Christie's 1969 novel, "Hallowe'en Party", which is one of her less well-known works. Having previously adapted classics Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile , the makers have opted to bring to screen something much less familiar to audiences. It feels like the makers are comfortable that movie-goers have grown used to Branagh's Poirot and therefore they can twist Christie's work more than before.

Set in Italy after World Two, a largely retired Poirot attends a seance with his friend Ariadne (Tina Fey). Needless to say, Poirot is unimpressed with the seance conductor, Miss Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), who he sees as a fraud preying on the vulnerable. But Rowena (Kelly Reilly) believes Reynolds can help connect her to the daughter she's lost.

When one of the guests is murdered, Poirot faces a chilling and terrifying case. It's clear the makers plan on playing up the Halloween theme and the movie is likely to have a scary tone. Plus his legendary mustache is back in full bushy mode!

Kenneth Branagh returns as Poirot. Joining him among others is Tina Fey, Jude Hill, Kyle Allen, Emma Laird, Michelle Yeoh, Camille Cottin and Jamie Dornan. 

Is there a trailer?

Yes and the trailer sets the movie up wonderfully...

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David is the What To Watch Editor and has over 20 years of experience in television journalism. He is currently writing about the latest television and film news for What To Watch.

Before working for What To Watch, David spent many years working for TV Times magazine, interviewing some of television's most famous stars including Hollywood actor Kiefer Sutherland, singer Lionel Richie and wildlife legend Sir David Attenborough. 

David started out as a writer for TV Times before becoming the title's deputy features editor and then features editor. During his time on TV Times, David also helped run the annual TV Times Awards. David is a huge Death in Paradise fan, although he's still failed to solve a case before the show's detective! He also loves James Bond and controversially thinks that Timothy Dalton was an excellent 007.

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A haunting in venice: release date, cast, story details, trailer & everything we know.

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• A Haunting in Venice is the latest installment in Kenneth Branagh's Poirot franchise, featuring a star-studded cast and a horror twist.
• The movie is based on Agatha Christie's novel Hallowe'en Party, with Poirot investigating a murder at a séance.
• A Haunting in Venice has generated high anticipation, with trailers, character posters, and a release date set for September 15, 2023.

A Haunting in Venice is the latest entry in Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot franchise, and here's everything to know before the A Haunting in Venice release date. A sequel to Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile , A Haunting in Venice sees Branagh reprising his role as Poirot to solve a new mystery. Based on the Agatha Christie novel Hallowe’en Party , A Haunting in Venice sees retired Poirot trying to find the perpetrator of a murder at a séance. While the first two movies were standard murder mysteries adapted from two of Christie’s best-known classics, A Haunting in Venice is shaking up the formula with deep-cut source material and a supernatural twist.

A Haunting in Venice news has been highly anticipated. Both Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile were warmly received by critics and performed well at the box office (although Death on the Nile ’s release was impacted by the pandemic), so 20th Century Studios is eager to keep the series going with more Poirot mysteries on the big screen . Branagh is back in the director’s chair and returning to the role of Poirot for a paranormal spin on the whodunit genre. From an all-star cast to a creepy story setup to a fast-approaching A Haunting in Venice release date, a lot of exciting details have been revealed about the threequel.

RELATED: 10 Ways A Haunting In Venice Is Already Improving Branagh's Hercule Poirot Movies

Most Recent A Haunting In Venice News

The most recent A Haunting in Venice 2023 movie news is a featurette-style trailer that looks at the new ensemble cast in the Agatha Christie story. The new A Haunting in Venice trailer reveals that Tina Fey's Ariadne Olive is actually loosely based on Agatha Christie herself, which makes for something of a meta twist on top of the genre switch-up to thriller. Ariadne isn't an original character created for the movie, as she was still a tongue-in-cheek creation by Christie and appeared in a number of novels. The fact that the character is played by a comedy actor in A Haunting in Venice means that the thriller movie will still keep some of the series' goofy humor.

The featurette was a great way to market the movie before the A Haunting in Venice release date, as the trailer not only gives a look into Fey's character but every other character in the séance too. The featurette showcases Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Dornan, Kelly Reilly, and several others, who all become Poirot's suspects in the threequel. Most notably, Mrs. Reynolds (Yeoh) is the seance organizer and seemingly becomes possessed by a dark spirit. While Ariadne is an old friend of Poriot's she becomes one of Poirot's suspects in the A Haunting in Venice movie too.

A Haunting In Venice Release Date

The A Haunting in Venice release date is September 15, 2023 . The A Haunting in Venice release date is shared with Challengers , Luca Guadagnino’s sports romance starring Zendaya as a tennis player caught in a love triangle. Given the September A Haunting in Venice release date, the movie will face competition from other highly anticipated sequels like The Equalizer 3 , The Nun 2 , My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 , and Expend4bles .

The A Haunting in Venice release date follows Death on the Nile by just over 18 months, and it's hardly surprising that the threequel was greenlit so quickly given how popular the series is. Michael Green, the writer of both Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile , returned for the threequel, which is based on Christie’s novel Hallowe’en Party . The supernatural themes of A Haunting in Venice are a departure from the franchise. Though the A Haunting in Venice 2023 movie is styled more as a spooky thriller than a full-blown horror film, its paranormal elements are a first for the series.

RELATED: 19 Best Agatha Christie Movie Adaptations Ranked

A Haunting In Venice Cast

Like its predecessors, the A Haunting in Venice cast is star-studded and totally brings its ensemble of suspects to life. Director Kenneth Branagh reprises his role as Hercule Poirot, one of the world’s greatest (and most eccentric) detectives, in A Haunting in Venice . Branagh is backed up by Jude Hill and Jamie Dornan, who play Leopold Ferrier and Leopold’s father in the A Haunting in Venice cast. Previously, Branagh cast Hill and Dornan as a father and son in his Oscar-winning semi-autobiographical coming-of-age movie Belfast , for which Hill won the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Young Performer.

After winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her turn as Evelyn Quan Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once , Michelle Yeoh now joins the A Haunting in Venice cast as Joyce Reynolds. Tina Fey, a former head writer of Saturday Night Live and creator and star of 30 Rock , plays a recurring character from the Christie novels, Ariadne Oliver, a mystery novelist based on Christie herself and friend of Poirot’s. Kyle Allen, best known as Balkan from Steven Spielberg’s superior West Side Story remake , plays Maxime Gerard, while Camille Cottin, best known as Paola Franchi in Ridley Scott’s true-crime caper House of Gucci , plays Olga Seminoff.

Ali Khan, the young actor who played Chaddick in the Netflix fantasy film The School for Good and Evil , appears in the A Haunting in Venice cast as Nicholas Holland. Desdemona Holland is played by Emma Laird, who previously played Iris in the hit Paramount Plus crime drama series Mayor of Kingstown . Kelly Reilly, best known as Dr. Watson’s wife Mary Morstan from Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes and its sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows , plays Rowena Drake in A Haunting in Venice . The A Haunting in Venice 2023 movie Vitale Portfoglio is played by Riccardo Scamarcio, best known for playing the villainous Santino D’Antonio in John Wick:

Chapter 2 .

Related: A Haunting In Venice Cast & Character Guide: Who's Who In The New Agatha Christie Movie

A Haunting In Venice Story Details

As the A Haunting in Venice release date nears, the full details of the story are still under wraps. The A Haunting in Venice story is a little different than the other Poirot mysteries that Branagh has adapted for the big screen. Whereas most Poirot mysteries revolve around a single murder, Hallowe’en Party opens with two murders. Branagh is departing from the source material in his adaptation of Hallowe’en Party . Although Hallowe’en Party is set in a sleepy English village, Branagh has switched the setting to Venice. The séance at which the murder takes place in A Haunting in Venice doesn’t appear in Hallowe’en Party. However, the Poirot novel Dumb Witness features a séance, so it's likely A Haunting in Venice could draw inspiration from here too.

A Haunting In Venice Trailer

20th Century Studios has dropped a teaser trailer for A Haunting in Venice , revealing the star-studded cast and the setup of a murder at a séance. The mood of the trailer is much different from the previous movies, as it creates a powerful sense of dread. The trailer opens with Poirot arriving in a post-World War II Venice after having been retired for 10 years. The expert detective arrives at a spooky, decayed, and supposedly haunted palazzo, teasing a much more supernatural outing for Poirot than ever seen before. The Haunting in Venice 2023 movie trailer gets spookier when Poirot enters the palazzo and is welcomed by Tina Fey's Ariadne Oliver.

Ariadne tells Poirot that she's skeptical about psychics, an opinion that Poirot shares when the A Haunting in Venice story starts. However, that all changes following terrifying events during the séance, which completely contradicts their opinion. Hercule was originally there to expose the psychic, but the trailer suggests that the detective becomes gullible to the supernatural goings-on in the palazzo, as he's seemingly haunted by ghost children. As the A Haunting in Venice release date gets closer, another trailer will be released, but the current trailer does a great job of preparing audiences for a much different Hercule Poirot movie.

• A Haunting In Venice