This one will haunt you for days

Venice is the most cinematic city in the world that I have ever been to, the last time in the August of 2019.

So that, even just out of a sense of nostalgia, A Haunting in Venice was already one of the must-see movies of the year for me – never mind that I hadn’t bothered to watch Kenneth Branagh’s earlier Agatha Christie book adaptations – Death on the Nile (2022) or Murder on the Orient Express (2017).

I was wholly prepared to watch “A Haunting in Venice” purely for the low-light scenes and digital cinematography of Haris Zambarloukos, which in and of itself is award-winning.

There were the sunset scenes and gondolas that brought stabs of fond reminiscences of walking over the countless bridges of Venezia.

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But then night falls, and the main character of the movie, the famous detective Hercule Poirot (played by director Branagh) with his fabulous moustache, and in the company of his mystery book writer friend, Ariadne Olivier, wittily played by the fantastic comedienne Tina Fey, goes for a séance at a supposedly haunted palazzo in Venice, on the eve of Halloween.

(The movie is adapted by Michael Green from Agatha Christie’s 1969 whodunnit book Halloween Party, and is set in 1947, although Venice is one of those timeless water cities of the world).

The séance is supposed to temporarily bring back the daughter of a grieving Rowena Drake (played by Kelly Reilly), who mysteriously died ill in bed after the breaking off of her engagement to the fortune hunting Maxime Gerard (Kyle Allen).

The palazzo is also supposedly haunted by vengeful ghost children, who passed away 600 years before during the Bubonic Plague (that decimated half of Europe’s population).

But it is after the séance by the “unholy Mrs Reynolds,” terrifyingly well played by the actress Michelle Yeoh that, you know, things really come to life. Like The Dead. Someone tries to drown Monsieur Detective Poirot, one of the other guests at the séance gets murdered, and, in classic Agatha Christie tradition, Poirot “imprisons” all the remaining guests inside the spooky palazzo, vowing that no one will leave “until we find out who the killer amongst us is!”

So, we have an active night-long murder investigation going on, even as we wonder if vindictive ghosts really exist, and are they the ones that are killing? After you leave this film, it haunts you, for days, weeks even.