![]() It’s a big-budget experiment, but created hastily and seemingly without much care or consideration for anything on the technical side. It’s too quick, every cut to an establishing shot comes too suddenly, and some scenes cut around close-ups and mids for conversations even more disastrously than Bohemian Rhapsody. With a Halloween theme but bigger Halloween movies to come out in October, it’s a shame the film couldn’t be allowed another few weeks to get the editing right and be released next month, because it’s off in almost every scene. If it were filmed in black and white, it would be better at least we’d be able to see people’s faces half the time, and work out who’s who. ![]() Everything looks the same: bland and dull and dusty and monotonous on the eyes. Everyone looks dour and depressed throughout. The sumptuous luxury of Orient and the desert sun of Nile becomes gloomy, dingy corridors, shadows running past flickering lamps. The tone shifts to that of a horror movie, the big budget ghost film being very much the zeitgeist of Hollywood currently (we have James Wan and Leigh Whannell to thank for that) and undoubtedly being one of the motivators for the change. Viewers would crucify anyone who meddled with their precious whodunnit.Īnd so suddenly we have a film which massively swings the other way, seemingly as a reaction to the mixed reviews of the previous films. With Orient, you can’t really change much, and as for Nile, well… this is Agatha Christie, after all. They looked glorious, but didn’t offer much that you could consider new. Not only is it a departure from Christie, it’s a departure from the approach of the previous two films, which were very faithful to the original material, and sometimes criticised by critics for being so. When trying to fathom how much of this story of murder at a Halloween party is being kept, when watching Branagh’s Poirot get his head dunked in the apple bobbing bowl that is so central to the source material before a murder is committed in the dark, one realises just how far removed this will be from the book. Good questions they are too, because many of the answers make no sense. What was it that made him feel the need to bring out this film 18 months after the last one? Why take one of the final Poirot novels, “Hallowe’en Party”, change the location from the quaint English countryside to a palazzo in the middle of Venice, shove most of the story into one night in one location (budget and scheduling probably answer that), and pretty much gut the novel save for a few moments of the book’s iconography? Why did the creative minds, writers and directors and producers, decide to make it very much a horror movie with a detective story plotline?Īll of these questions bounce from wall to wall as you sit in the comfy red seats of the cinema to watch A Haunting in Venice. All the more impressive as Branagh had brought out Belfast in the interim. After 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express and 2022’s Death on the Nile, the next one comes in quick succession. There’s no slowing down this particular train, however. Starring: Kenneth Branagh, Tina Fey, Camille Cottin, Kelly Reiley, Jude Hill, Jamie Dornan, Michelle Yeoh, Emma Laird, Kyle Allenįollowing two previous adaptations of Agatha Christie’s beloved Poirot novels, featuring the eponymous detective, you’d think there’d be a bit of a break.
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