Review: 'A Haunting in Venice' lets Kenneth Branagh put Poirot into a ghost story, with mixed results

Speaking as a non-reader of Agatha Christie, I thought director-actor Kenneth Branagh’s third excursion into Christie’s world, “A Haunting in Venice,” was a serviceable and occasionally engaging mix of detective thriller and ghost story — though it ends with a reminder of why those two things don’t go together.

My favorite Christie aficionado, to whom I am married, disliked parts of the movie, for reasons I will get into as we go.

This time out, Branagh is not remaking one of Christie’s much-filmed popular works — like his previous efforts, “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile,” with which most people are familiar and probably knew whodunnit before they set foot in the theater. This movie is loosely based (and, according to my wife, the word “loosely” is doing a lot of work here) on Christie’s more obscure “Hallowe’en Party,” so Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green (who also wrote the last two) have some room to color outside the lines.

It’s 1947, and the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (played again by Branagh) has retired to Venice. (The book was set in the English countryside, but Venice is a more apt locale for a scary story.) He’s no longer taking cases, and his bodyguard, Vitale Portfoglio (Riccardo Scamarcio), keeps supplicants at bay, sometimes by dumping them into a canal. One old acquaintance does get through the door: Mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), who claims to possess an even sharper mind than Poirot.

(As my wife has explained to me, Christie wrote Ariadne into the Poirot novels — eight of them, I learned — essentially to create a version of herself who could match wits with Poirot and talk inside baseball about the pitfalls of writing detective fiction. As my wife also explains it, Ariadne is a gray-haired English woman who works more on intuition than logic. Turning her into Fey’s spunky American, my wife said, isn’t the worst sin committed against her here, but to say more would be giving away too much.)

Ariadne presents Poirot with a challenge: To attend a seance on Halloween night, being held in the crumbling canal-side mansion of retired opera singer Rowena Drake (played by “Yellowstone’s” Kelly Reilly). Rowena’s daughter, Alicia (played by Rowan Robinson in flashbacks) died a year earlier, and Rowena is hoping a famous medium, Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), can summon Alicia’s spirit.

Others attending the seance: Portfoglio; Rowena’s superstitious housekeeper, Olga Seminoff (Camille Cottin); Dr. Leslie Ferrier (Jamie Dornan), who treated Alicia and is suffering PTSD from the war; Dr. Ferrier’s young son, Leopold (Jude Hill, who played Dornan’s son in Branagh’s “Belfast”); Mrs. Reynolds’ assistant, Desdemona Holland (Emma Laird); and a late arrival, Alicia’s one-time fiancé, hotheaded Maxime Gerard (Kyle Allen). (Desdemona’s brother, Nicholas, played by Ali Khan, also factors into all this.)

Branagh, as director, has a lot of creepy fun setting the Hallowe’en mood — hearkening back to his second movie as director, the noir thriller “Dead Again.” Branagh may be sporting a Belgian accent for Poirot, but his camera preference is Dutch angles, which give everything a sinister, spooky slant.

Of course, there’s a murder. Just before that, though, there’s almost another murder, of Poirot himself. This seems to throw the detective off his game. He starts seeing shadows and spirits and things that go bump in the night. 

This is where I, as a repeat viewer of Christie-based movies, started to lose my faith in Branagh’s plan. The whole point of Hercule Poirot is that he’s the guy who cuts through the humbug and the hocus pocus, applying logic and intelligence to find the killer — who is not a phantom or a monster, but an ordinary human being with very human motives and methods. Suggesting otherwise, though fun for a storyteller, is another red herring in the way of Poirot’s solution of the case, and I got impatient waiting for the movie to realize that, too.

Where “A Haunting in Venice” is at its best is when Poirot is working the case, talking one-by-one to the potential suspects, making lists and eliminating blind alleys. Branagh revels in these scenes, and his pairing with Fey — sharp and acerbic, even when the character inexplicably shifts gears from skeptic to believer — adds a dose of wit and prickly charm. If Branagh portrays Poirot again, here’s hoping he gives Fey’s Ariadne another case on which to collaborate.

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‘A Haunting in Venice’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong violence, disturbing images and thematic elements. Running time: 103 minutes.